| MadSci Network: Botany |
Without more details on your experiment, it is hard to evaluate the results. If you grew plants under a real electric power line, your results of dead plants do not fit reality. Electric power companies spend millions of dollars annually to either prune plants under power lines or spray them with herbicides or chemical growth retardants to keep trees from damaging the wires. Maybe your plants were killed by herbicide residues. Because you had different locations for the EMF exposed plants and the control plants, it may have been some difference in soil, light, water, disease, fertility, animal damage, etc. that caused the plants under the wires to die. To establish an EMF effect in an experiment, it is also necessary to actually measure the EMF for both treatment and control plants. There is a lot of literature on EMF effects on plants but as you can observe there is no obvious effect of power line EMF on plant growth. In general, studies suggest that EMF at the proper strength may give a slight beneficial effect on plant growth. However, the literature seems to be mainly in rather obscure journals dealing with electricity or magnetism rather than plants. That is important because the researchers are likely to be experts in electricity or magnetism rather than plants. Thus, they may not know how to properly conduct plant experiments. Some plant EMF experiments used such high voltages that the plants were damaged indirectly by electrostatic discharges. There are a couple of student projects on the web about EMF effects on plants. The third website cited below is a student project that found a distortion of the seed pod in the EMF treated Wisconsin fast plants. However, I have grown the same kind of plants and often seen that exact symptom so it is not due to EMF. References Re: Does proximity to high voltage lines affect the growth of plants? Plant life near power transmission lines How does EMF affect plant physiology The effect of EMF on plant growth Re: Would placing seeds in a magnetic field before planting affect their germination and growth? Re: plant growth-strong magnetic fields vs diamagnetism/paramagetism EMF and plant growth discussion Magnetic field effects on plants and fungi
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