Most of the space on Derek Muller’s second-floor balcony in Lake Chelan, Wash., is occupied by buckets of soil planted with radishes, cucumbers and beefsteak tomatoes. In half the buckets, lengths of copper and steel wire are coiled into spirals and nestled alongside the plants. This isn’t just a garden: It’s an experiment in electroculture.

The idea, in its simplest terms, is that because the cells of plants — just like our own — have electrical signals, you can increase the plants’ growing energy by capturing atmospheric electricity and directing it into the soil.

The term has surged on social media in recent months as growers with gardens large and small give electroculture a shot. A public Facebook group called Energetic Agriculture has more than 150,000 members. The search terms “electroculture,” “electroculture gardening” and “electroculture copper wire” have been spiking on Google since early spring, and on TikTok, the hashtag has racked up more than 97 million views. Tutorials abound, with users demonstrating how to create antennas by wrapping copper wire around long wooden dowels or bamboo stakes. And there are plenty of before-and-after testimonials from gardeners who say that adding electroculture antennas made their plants flourish.

Muller is among them. “We didn’t see much difference in the radishes, to be honest, but the cucumbers and tomatoes are showing a great difference,” he says. Those with antennas are “taller plants, with bigger stalks and greener leaves.”

But for every gardener who swears by electroculture, it seems there’s another ready to debunk it. Most evidence is anecdotal, and modern scientific studies are sparse. Still, proof may be mounting: Research in Europe and Asia has shown encouraging results and electroculture advocates — and some scientists — say that harnessing electricity could revolutionize food production.

Technology with old roots

Electroculture might be having a moment on social media, but the idea isn’t new. In the mid-1700s, around the time of Benjamin Franklin’s kite-and-key discovery, electroculture experiments were widespread among aristocratic scientists, including Jean-Antoine Nollet, the French physicist who discovered osmosis, and English physician (and grandfather to Charles) Erasmus Darwin. In 1783 another French physicist, Pierre Bertholon de Saint-Lazare, published “De L’électricité des Végétaux,” which recounted many of his contemporaries’ experiments in plant electrification.

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Bertholon’s book also promoted an invention, the “electro-vegeto-meter,” which used a large system of metal pillars and wires above a garden to electrify the whole plot. Things went haywire when Jan Ingenhousz, the discoverer of photosynthesis, installed the device in his garden and the plants promptly died. Ingenhousz publicly maligned the idea, and for the next century, electroculture fell out of vogue.

In 1898, Finnish physics professor Karl Selim Lemström spoke at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He’d noted that trees grew more rapidly beneath the aurora borealis, an effect he attributed to the northern lights’ electrical field. His experiments prompted British scientists to conduct their own, and early findings were so promising that, in 1918, the British Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries convened an official committee to investigate electroculture.

In 1936, with funding depleted, the committee disbanded. The subject was largely forgotten by the scientific community after World War II, says Yannick Van Doorne, a Belgian agricultural engineer and vocal advocate of electroculture, as synthetic pesticides and herbicides, originally invented to support military efforts, became popular. The United States, for example, dealt with a surplus of the bomb ingredient ammonium nitrate by marketing it to farmers as fertilizer.

“It was like magic. You put a powder on your field and it grows better,” says Van Doorne. “It was easy and cheap. Electroculture was more mysterious; they didn’t understand how it worked and it was difficult to use at a large scale.” So, Van Doorne says, it was abandoned again, dismissed as pseudoscience and relegated to a folksy practice.

Re-energizing the debate

Early this spring, videos about electroculture began cropping up on social media, generating both curiosity and skepticism. Gardening influencer Kevin Espiritu falls into the latter category. He posted an Instagram video telling the 1 million followers of his channel, Epic Gardening, that antennas do not work. “Do you think if I could bury wooden dowels with copper rods in my garden … and I’d have absolutely epic produce, that I wouldn’t do it?” he says. “You’d be seeing this whole place covered in copper rods.”

Espiritu is unconvinced by anecdotes about increased production, he says, because he hasn’t seen any explanation for how an antenna could physically aid a plant’s growth.

“Does it help it better photosynthesize? Does it help it better uptake nutrients? Does it speed up the cellular metabolism of the plant? No one seems to have that answer,” he says. “And when someone says, ‘It’s harnessing natural earth energy,’ it’s like, okay, cool. Remember when we believed the air was full of ‘ether?’”

While there’s no hard evidence to suggest copper antennas, the “bastardized, social media-lite version” of electroculture, as Espiritu puts it, have any impact in the garden, research in the greater field is surging. Some studies have shown that other electrified systems may work.

Research in Japan, for example, found that generating artificial lightning strikes near shiitake logs almost doubled the number of mushrooms they produced. And in 2018, Chinese scientists told the South China Morning Post that an experiment that involved applying pulses of positive voltage to crops created a 20 to 30 percent jump in yields. The World Economic Forum wrote that “the implications of these experiments are enormous too. … Producing more food without putting exponential pressure on resources, or using prohibitively high levels of chemicals is likely to be one of the 21st century’s abiding themes.”

A more recent Chinese study published in the journal Nature Food used a device called a triboelectric nanogenerator, powered by wind and rain, to create an electric field over a crop of peas. The device was built for under $40, and it sped up germination and increased the peas’ yield by close to 20 percent. It’s technology that could be immediately scaled, the scientists wrote, and which “may profoundly contribute to the construction of a sustainable economy.”

But nothing about electroculture is settled fact, and a 2018 systematic review of 19 studies on the subject found they all “suffered from methodological flaws, which lowered credibility in the results.”

Whether it can transform agriculture remains to be seen, but it’s unlikely that adding copper rods to your garden could harm your plants. The risks to trying it are low, though Espiritu notes the possibility, albeit improbable, that a tall enough copper pole could attract lightning strikes.

Electroculture’s supporters are determined that, this time, it won’t be swept under the rug.

Muller, a filmmaker, will release a documentary called “Electroculture Life” featuring Van Doorne and other advocates. A crowdfunding campaign for the project raised more than $40,000. The time might finally be right, says Van Doorne, for electroculture’s moment in the sun.

“Today the media speaks about pollution, about chemicals, and everybody wants to find solutions,” he says. “Fertilizers have seen a price increase like never before, so farmers are looking for alternatives. People are beginning to garden because of food prices, and because they want autonomy. And everybody wants the best results with no work, so electroculture is very interesting.”

Kate Morgan is a freelance writer in Richland, Pa.