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Did you know that the British government spent 20 years between the First and Second World

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Wars investigating the possibilities of electrifying plants?

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And they did it in almost complete secrecy.

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That research wasn't quite the complete dead end that I originally imagined, and maybe

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not quite as harebrained either.

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In fact, it was just the first sign of a complete new science, or as many others would have

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it, pseudoscience.

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Called electroculture.

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But electroculture has even deeper roots than the period between the war years.

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I found information from 1780 and 1790 that electroculture was being actively experimented

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with, both in England and across the Channel, and France and the rest of Europe.

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In France, for example, in the late 1770s,

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Bernard Jermaine Etienne de la Ville-Thouillon began some experiments watering plants with

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water, which, as he had put it, had been impregnated with electrical fluid.

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He published a 700-plus page long essay on electricity in 1781, which reported his findings that the germination

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of seeds and the sprouting of bulbs was quicker, and when plants were electrified, they grew with

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more vigour than usual.

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There were other French would-be electricians, too, notably Abba Pierre Bethard, who had already

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written about the benefits of electricity and health, and other related subjects.

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Now, he, too, tried watering plants with electrified water, delivered from an insulated barrel on a trolley

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that he trundled along between the rows.

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In 1783, he published Electricity des Vegetables, which included a description of the first electroculture

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tool, the Electro-Vegetamometer.

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You remember the story of Benjamin Franklin flying a kite to attract lightning?

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Well, that's what Berthlon aimed to replicate.

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He set up miniature lightning conductors to collect electricity from the atmosphere, and

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then distributed the charge via wires across the garden.

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Don't ask me how precisely.

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It was too complicated to read and translate the 18th-century technical French.

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But this picture should give you the general idea.

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Now, things really started to buzz again in the 1840s when a whole new generation of experimenters

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began to test out new theories and report their findings in serious scientific journals.

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This is probably due to the invention of what was called an Earth battery by Alexander Bain in 1841.

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Bain's device operated on the same principles as a modern battery, except the zinc and the copper

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plates were put into the soil and connected above the ground by wires.

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Plants grown in the area between the two plates grew faster and yielded more.

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So, in 1844, Robert Forster, a Scottish landowner, used what he termed atmospheric electricity

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to substantially boost his barley crop.

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The details were reported in the British Cultivator in March 1845, local newspapers across the country,

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and letters on agricultural improvement, also reported on it.

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They added that Forster was still indeflatably employed in collecting electro-cultural facts

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from our most eminent electricians.

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So, I don't know where Forster got the idea from and discovered that he was far from unique,

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that there were plenty of amateur scientists who had never stopped trying to perfect a way

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of getting electricity to boost plant growth.

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Forster had, for example, read in George Glennie's Gardener's Gazette about an experiment by a lady

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who caused a constant flow of electricity to be afforded by a common electrical machine

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to proceed from a summer or garden house, and which was diffused by a wire to a fixed portion

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of the surrounding ground, and the effect was that vegetation did not cease.

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So, obviously, she tried a similar thing and had positive results.

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Now, much of the early history of electroculture in both Britain and on the European continent,

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including Forster's work in Scotland, was written up by Edward Solly, a fellow of the Royal Society

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and an experimental chemist to the Horticultural Society.

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They published on the influence of electricity on vegetation in the Journal of the Horticultural Society in 1845.

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A lot of people were still very sceptical, though.

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The Farmer's Guide to Scientific and Practical Agriculture said in 1851

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that although electricity could be classed as a special manure,

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no one has yet been able to reap similar advantages from similar experiments as Dr. Forster obtained from his.

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And it's doubtful that electroculture will be pursued further for some time.

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So, after this flurry, once again I thought that was the end of electroculture, but I was wrong.

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In the 1880s, Professor Karl Limpström of Helsinki University, a geophysicist studying the Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights,

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began to wonder if they had an effect on plant growth because he noticed that the trees in the far north grew rapidly despite the short growing season.

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This led him to experimenting with the effects of atmospheric electricity on the germination of seeds and plant growth.

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Limpström's results attracted international attention,

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and he was able to conduct some of his later experiments in collaboration with other scientists in Sweden, Germany and England.

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Eventually, in 1904, he published Electricity in Agriculture and Horticulture,

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in which he offered his detailed findings that there was an increase of the harvest of every kind of plant which has come under this treatment,

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but also a favourable change in their chemical compounds which made fruits sweeter and their scent stronger.

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Around the same time, in France, the Agricultural Institute at Boervet, under its director Father Pauline,

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began what they hoped were a series of experiments to decide once and for all whether this electrical charging worked.

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Pauline refined Abbe-Berthon's Electro-Vegeta-Momomenta,

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devising an atmospheric antenna that he called a geomagnetifier.

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Installed initially in a field of potatoes, plants within its reach were greener, healthier, and produced more potatoes.

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Later, it was tried in vineyards and produced sweeter, larger grapes that produced better quality wine.

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Another researcher, Fernand Bastille, installed wine in a school garden, which he named after Abbe-Berthon.

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Bastille then went on to organise the first International Conference on Electroculture,

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held in Reims in northern France in 1912,

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which showed that there was an active research going on across the globe.

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Britain had particular reasons to be interested,

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because of food shortages during the First World War,

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caused by a blockade by the German Navy.

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It became a government priority to improve agricultural and horticultural production.

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So in 1918, a group of British scientists set up experiments to test the efficiency of electricity at boosting yields.

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These generally appeared to show impressive, though not universal, increases.

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Nevertheless, it resulted in considerable interest from the agricultural and horticultural communities

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who lobbied the government for further research.

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In response, the Board of Agriculture set up the Electroculture Committee to investigate further.

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Membership was impressive.

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An interdisciplinary mix of physicists, biologists, electrical engineers, and agriculturists,

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including a Nobel Prize winner and six fellows of the Royal Society.

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It was chaired by Sir John Snell, chairman of the Electricity Commission.

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Unfortunately, their field trials, based on the idea proposed by Lemstrom on a wide range of crops,

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suffered from several years of bad weather, and they were forced to use plants and pots.

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Nevertheless, their results showed that the electro-cultural effect was real,

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and it promised substantial gains.

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But unfortunately, that they were also highly erratic and hard to control.

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Meanwhile, work in other countries, including the U.S., was a little less encouraging.

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The Department of Agriculture issued a bulletin in 1926 which concluded that a review of the literature

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of electro-cultural experimentation up to the present times does not lend assurance of great progress.

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Ten years later, in 1936, the British Electrocultural Committee was wound up,

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concluding that there was little advantage to continue the work either on an economic or on a scientific ground,

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and regret that after so exhaustive a study on this matter that practical results should be so disappointing.

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So electro-culture was clearly now seen officially as a curious but unreliable phenomenon,

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and pursuing it, a waste of time.

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Once again, the interest faded away.

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However, David Kinahan of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at the University College of London,

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who had researched the committee's work, came up with another interesting fact or two.

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He discovered in the National Archives that although their annual reports contained many positive facts,

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these were never made public because, from 1922 onwards, their reports were all marked not for publication,

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with only two copies ever printed, one for the Minister and one for the Archives.

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Although the work was not a classified secret, he was able to ascertain why, effectively,

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the committee's findings should have been suppressed like this.

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Does anyone get any thoughts on that?

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Things were definitely not secret in France, where Justin Christophe Fleur,

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an engineer and inventor, wanted to do away with chemical fertilisers,

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but still improve plant growth, rejuvenate old plants, and deal with many pests and diseases.

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He experimented in his own electric vegetable garden,

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using what he called an electromagnetic ptero-celestial power.

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It was well reported in gardening and even in national press that he travelled the world lecturing,

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eventually writing it all up in electroculture, which was translated into English.

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I've read that book myself.

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Short, sharp read.

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Gives you everything you need to know in about 70 pages.

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Despite being persecuted for his inventions by lobbyists from the Agrochemical Centre,

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over 150,000 of his devices were sold before war broke out in 1939 and closed the factory.

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Christophe Fleur still commands a lot of interest, and although he died in 1938,

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he has his own Facebook page and an official archive.

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As a result of all the work of these early researchers, there was plenty of evidence,

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even though it was of variable quality, and they kept asking the question,

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how can we make this work better?

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But there was no convincing answer as to why electricity had these effects.

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There were all sorts of theories, but no certainty,

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until the Indian plant physiologist Sajagdish Chandra devised incredibly sensitive equipment

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to prove that plants responded physically, in the same way as animals do, to electrical impulses.

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This was written up in a series of books by him, including

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Response in the Living and Non-Living, 1902,

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Comparative Electrophysiology, 1907,

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and the Motor Mechanism of Plants, 1928.

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Now, despite further research, it was not until 2006 that Andrew Goldsworthy,

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a plant biotechnologist from Imperial College in London,

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put forward what seems like the most likely explanation for what actually caused this reaction.

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He showed that what is seen in electroculture experiments

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is a plant's natural reaction to a brewing thunderstorm.

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Physicists, meteorologists, and other scientists agree.

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So if, as this suggests, the electro-cultural effect everyone is investigating

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is a simple physiological response,

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then why, I wonder, aren't our fields full of devices designed to fall plants

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into thinking that there was about to be a thunder?

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Plants need water, so plants in drier locations gain an evolutionary advantage

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if they can maximise their use of sudden downpours,

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such as produced in a thunderstorm, before it soaks away.

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Thunderstorms carry an electrical charge,

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and somehow plants have learned to read that as a signal

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that heavy rain is on its way.

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What lab experiments show was that the optimal electrical charge

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to be applied to plants to increase yield turned out to be similar

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to the charge that is present in a thunderstorm.

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When it receives the charge, a plant activates genes that speed up its metabolism,

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and that includes increasing the rate at which the roots can absorb water,

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and thus that encourages growth.

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So if, as this suggests, the electro-cultural effect everyone is investigating

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is a simple physiological response,

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then why, I wonder, aren't our fields full of devices

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to plants into thinking that there was about to be a thunderstorm?

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So thank you for allowing me to share what I've recently learned

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about the fascinating subject of electro-culture.

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In next week's video, I'm going to be showing you exactly how you can attract

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the magic electrical flux into your garden

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and improve the growth of your own plants.

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So stay tuned to Tiny House and Off-Grid Resources.

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The next video, I will be dropping a link up here.

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It won't be there immediately.

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It will be there after I've created the video.

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So anybody watching this subsequently can jump from this one,

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the history of electro-culture,

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straight into how and why it works.

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Thank you.