Case study — Electric Fertilizer's own field experiment

The Sunflower+ Project

A 2013–2014 field-scale attempt to combine electroculture with phytoremediation — using electrical stimulation to help sunflowers draw lead out of contaminated urban soil. The verdict, stated up front: mixed and inconclusive, not a clean success. That honesty is the point of documenting it here.

Overview

In 2013, Electric Fertilizer partnered on a vacant-lot revitalization project in Old North St. Louis, working alongside Washington University's Sam Fox School and the City of St. Louis. The project planted sunflowers (Helianthus annuus) across a lead-contaminated lot, with half the planting area electrified using a low-voltage DC field, to test whether electrical stimulation could accelerate the plants' uptake of soil lead — a technique sometimes called electrokinetic phytoremediation.

The project won the Sustainable Land Lab Competition, a real, independently documented civic recognition — not just a claim on Electric Fertilizer's own site (see Historical Documents below).

This page is a short, evidence-graded summary. For the complete first-person field account — electrode corrosion, the waterlogged monitoring electronics, and a detailed seeds-vs-seedlings analysis — see the full Season 1 retrospective.

Project Context

The lot itself was the kind of vacant, contaminated urban parcel common across older St. Louis neighborhoods — the project framed sunflowers as a way to turn that liability into a visible community asset while researching a real remediation question. Independent corroboration exists: the City of St. Louis's own Sustainable Land Lab program page names the project, and a local blog, St. Louis City Talk, covered it directly — naming project lead Don Koster of the Sam Fox School, a detail Electric Fertilizer's own posts never included.

Experimental Design

Electrodes ("compound"/"super" electrodes) were installed across planting rows at roughly 5-foot spacing, delivering 1.5–3V DC to half the plot; the other half was planted identically but left unelectrified as a comparison area. A webcam and, later, a microcontroller-based system were set up to monitor the site remotely.

Before the field planting, a smaller seed pre-test compared electrified and non-electrified sunflower seeds (n=4 seeds per group — not statistically powered, and reported as such). The electrified seeds sprouted roughly 5 days sooner than the control group in that pre-test.

Season 1 / Field Observations

The richest primary data in the whole project comes from the "First Success" progress report: sunflowers closest to the electrodes grew visibly taller than the surrounding rows — by roughly a foot in the most pronounced cases — with growth forming a gradient that correlated with distance from the electrodes. This was a real, field-observed pattern, not an inference, though it was measured visually and photographically rather than with instrumented height logging.

What Worked

  • The seed pre-test showed faster electrified sprouting (qualitative, n=4/group).
  • A real, if partial, height gradient was observed in the field, correlated with electrode distance.
  • The project itself was real, externally recognized, and independently corroborated.

What Didn't

  • The buried monitoring electronics failed from water damage during the season.
  • No before/after soil-lead measurements were ever published — the core phytoremediation question was never actually answered with data.
  • The project's own title for its wrap-up post was, plainly, "Season 1 Postmortem."

Lessons

The project's own postmortem was candid about what went wrong — buried electronics needed to be fully waterproofed, and the monitoring plan should have had a low-tech fallback for when the high-tech one failed. That candor is itself worth preserving: Electric Fertilizer documented a real field failure mode rather than quietly dropping the project or rewriting it into a success story after the fact.

Historical Documents

The full serialized account, for readers who want it, across all 8 original pages and posts:

Independent corroboration: City of St. Louis Sustainable Land Lab program page and St. Louis City Talk coverage.

Current Interpretation

This project demonstrated a real, field-scale attempt at electrokinetic phytoremediation, honestly reported from planning through failure. It did not establish independently verified contamination-removal data — no soil-lead measurements were published, before or after. Treat the height-gradient observation as a genuine field signal worth further study, and treat the phytoremediation claim itself as unresolved, not confirmed.

Related Research

For the current evidence-graded research library, see Research. For how electrical fields interact with soil generally, see What Is Electroculture. For the origin of Electric Fertilizer's experimentation, see My First Experiment.