How Electro-Agriculture Could Change Farming Forever

Nearly half of the world’s land (44%) is used for agriculture, according to data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, with one-third of that going to croplands and two-thirds to grazing land. That’s a whole lot of space where trees once grew and where people once roamed. While we need to continue to increase our output of food production to serve the growing global population, there may be a way to save a whole lot of land while growing even more food, and it involves some seriously cool science known as “electric farming.” 

Yes, it’s just as futuristic as it sounds. Electric farming, or “electro-agriculture,” does something rather unique. It enhances photosynthesis, which is how plants convert the sun’s light into energy and replaces sunlight with a solar-powered chemical reaction to “more efficiently converts carbon dioxide into an organic molecule that plants would be genetically engineered to ‘eat,'” Cell Press explains. This would allow plants to grow in complete darkness without the need for light, soil, or a ton of land. Here’s what you need to know about the process and how it could change global food production forever. 

What is electro-agriculture?

In its simplest terms, electro-agriculture is an alternative way of growing produce that doesn’t involve direct sunlight.

“If we don’t need to grow plants with sunlight anymore, then we can decouple agriculture from the environment and grow food in indoor, controlled environments,” Robert Jinkerson of the University of California, Riverside, who is also a corresponding author of a new study on the method, and biological engineer, shared with Cell Press. “I think that we need to move agriculture into the next phase of technology, and producing it in a controlled way that is decoupled from nature has to be the next step.”

How does electro-agriculture work?

The science of electro-agriculture works by placing solar panels on or near the buildings that would absorb radiation from the sun, which would then be used to power a chemical reaction between carbon dioxide and water, which would produce acetate, which Cell Press explained is “a molecule similar to acetic acid, the main component in vinegar.” It would then be used to grow the plants in a hydroponic environment.

“The whole point of this new process is to try to boost the efficiency of photosynthesis,” Feng Jiao, an electrochemist at Washington University in St. Louis and lead author of the study, shared. “Right now, we are at about 4% efficiency, which is already four times higher than for photosynthesis, and because everything is more efficient with this method, the CO2 footprint associated with the production of the food becomes much smaller.”

However, as the Food Institute noted, this method relies on genetically modified plants that eat acetate. And, to get the plants to eat acetate, they are currently “exploiting a pathway that allows germinating plants to break down food stored in seeds,” which naturally switch off during photosynthesis, the institute explained. But, as Jinkerson noted, “Mushrooms and yeast and algae, however, can be grown like this today, so I think that those applications could be commercialized first, and plants will come later down the line.” He added that what they are really trying to do is “turn this pathway back on in adult plants and reawaken their native ability to utilize acetate … It’s analogous to lactose intolerance in humans — as babies, we can digest lactose in milk, but for many people that pathway is turned off when they grow up. It’s kind of the same idea, only for plants.”

How can electro-agriculture be implemented?

All this technology is still in the experimental phase, so producing it at a large scale is still far off on the horizon. And, as Earth.com explained, the team is first focused on testing the methods with tomatoes and lettuce, then will set its sights on “high-calorie” crops like sweet potatoes and grains.

“For plants, we’re still in the research-and-development phase of trying to get them to utilize acetate as their carbon source because plants have not evolved to grow this way, but we’re making progress,” Jinkerson shared with Cell Press. 

How much land can electro-agriculture save from becoming farmland?

Again, this is future tech and would require serious investment to get off the ground, but the benefits — at least hypothetically — are astronomical. 

“If the United States food supply was produced via electro-agriculture, land usage could be decreased by 88% while substantially streamlining food supply chains by decentralizing food production,” the researchers wrote in their study. This means potentially freeing up land from deforestation and placing vertical farms in urban environments, further reducing carbon footprint through lessening the need for distant transportation. It could even be implemented in deserts and, one day, be used in outer space. And, importantly, the researchers added in their conclusion that their system could eliminate food price spikes by “establishing a food system in a controlled environment that is less susceptible to increasingly severe weather, droughts, and flooding due to a rapidly changing climate.” 

As Jiao shared, “This is just the first step for this research, and I think there’s a hope that its efficiency and cost will be significantly improved in the near future.”