To find out, China has been carrying out the largest test in the world, and the result will fundamentally change the agricultural production of the most populous country in the world.
From the remote desert to the developed coastal areas in the East, a "electrical cultivation" project funded by the Chinese government is being launched nationwide, with a total area of more than 3600 hectares of vegetable greenhouses.
Last month, Chinese (Academy of Agricultural Sciences) and other government research institutions released the results of the study in the past 30 years in areas with different climate, soil conditions and planting habits. They see the results as a breakthrough.
This technology has increased vegetable yield by 20% to 30%, reduced the use of pesticides by 70% to 100%, and reduced the use of fertilizers by more than 20%.
These vegetables grow under bare copper wires. These copper wires are about 3 meters above the ground and extend from top to bottom under the roof of vegetable greenhouses. When electrified, these copper wires can generate fast positive charges up to 50,000 volts, more than 400 times the voltage of standard American homes.
High frequency current can kill bacteria and viruses in the air or soil, thus inhibiting the spread of disease. It can also inhibit the surface tension of water on leaves and accelerate evaporation.
Within plants, high frequency current accelerates the transport of natural charged particles such as bicarbonate and calcium ions, and increases metabolic activities such as carbon dioxide uptake and photosynthesis.
Professor Liu Binjiang is a government agricultural scientist and a major member of the project. He said the current through the copper wire is only one millionth of an ampere, which is lower than the working current of the smart phone.
"It's absolutely harmless to plants and people standing nearby," he said.
Liu pointed out that due to the positive findings of this study, the area of electrified farms in China is growing at an unprecedented rate, with annual growth of 1000 hectares to 1300 hectares.
This means that in the next 12 months, the growth rate of electrical cultivation in China will reach 40%.
"Most recent investments have come from the private sector," Liu said. "Business is taking off. We are providing technology and equipment to other countries such as China, the United States, Australia and China.
"China is ahead of the rest of the world."
History
This is not always the case. In fact, China has been lagging behind for more than 200 years in this respect.
In 1746, just a few years before Benjamin Franklin (Benjamin Franklin) used a kite to catch lightning in a rainstorm, Dr. Mai M Bray (Maimbray) gave electrical stimulation to two Myrtle plants.
He observed that trees grew new branches in October, something that had never happened before.
The news then spread. Many similar studies have been carried out across Europe, some confirming the discovery of Mambre and others not.
For example, a trial carried out in a Chinese medicine field found that after a period of unusual high yield, these plants began to become fruitless and gradually wither.
In 1902, S. Lemstroem, a professor of physics, visited the Arctic and found that some trees grew faster under the aurora than their counterparts in the temperate southern regions.
Lemstroem attributes this phenomenon to the natural electrical environment generated by the aurora (also known as the northern lights). To prove this, he did a series of experiments in the laboratory and even wrote a book to promote his hypothesis.
Sir Oliver Lodge, a British physicist, is the key inventor of radio development. He has read the book and conducted related experiments. It is reported that the wheat yield of 8 hectares of wheat field increased by 24% to 39%.
This has attracted the attention of governments. In the early 20th century, the United Kingdom and the United States commissioned scientific research institutions to conduct research on electrical cultivation.
The results in Britain are positive, but the results in the United States are negative.
These experiments are mostly small-scale, often conducted in open fields, and the conditions vary from place to place. The effects of different natural conditions make the results different, and there are no general hardware design standards or technical details about electrical cultivation, such as the voltage and frequency used in the experiment are different.
In these pioneering studies, scientists also lack advanced equipment. For example, they don't have today's portable spectrometers to study plant responses to electricity at the molecular level.
Therefore, the explanation of the observed phenomena is still speculative. With the emergence of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, large-scale agricultural production has been realized, and people's interest has also declined.
China leads
With the rise of organic agriculture, public interest in electrical cultivation has been renewed. In 1990, the Chinese government began to subsidize this technology experiment.
He Feng, senior technician of Yufa Jingnan vegetables Production and Sales, Beijing's largest vegetable producer, said that the company has been involved in the project since 2014, and the result is "very satisfactory".
In just two years, electrical cultivation of vegetables has brought about an additional income of nearly 1.2 million yuan for the company.
"We're still running the device and the power consumption is very low," he said.
A hectare of electric greenhouse greenhouse requires about 15 degrees of electricity a day, about half the electricity used by the average American household.
In the greenhouse, the air was filled with the smell of summer thunderstorms. Low humidity, plants rarely get sick.
He said that the biggest expenditure is installation costs, necessary hardware costs up to tens of thousands of yuan
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