Can Electro-Agriculture Revolutionize the Way We Grow Food?

In 2023, some 700 million people around the world faced hunger, a crisis made worse by climate change, conflict and economic instability, according to the United Nations. As the food system strains under these pressures, new technologies are emerging to address these global challenges. One such innovation—electro-agriculture—offers a potential solution.

This past November, researchers published a new study in the journal Joule that introduced a process that uses electricity to decouple agriculture from traditional limitations like sunlight, land and soil, potentially revolutionizing the way we grow food and opening the door to a more sustainable and efficient food system.

“We’re very excited about it,” says Feng Jiao, an electrochemist at Washington University in St. Louis and one of the lead researchers of the study. “You could call it the next generation of agriculture.”

The science behind electro-agriculture

At its core, electro-agriculture is about replacing sunlight with electricity to facilitate plant growth by converting carbon dioxide (CO2) and water into molecules that plants can metabolize. The process builds on a well-established scientific principle: electrolysis. First developed in the late 18th century, electrolysis works by applying an electric current to a substance, causing the substance to undergo a chemical change.

In a basic electrolysis setup, an electric current splits CO2 into carbon monoxide (CO). However, this alone doesn’t provide enough organic carbon for plants to bypass photosynthesis. Another study led by Jiao, published in Nature Food in June 2022, developed a two-step process called tandem electrolysis to address this.

In the first step, CO2 is reduced to CO. In the second step, the CO is converted into acetate, a vital source of carbon for plants, providing them with energy and the building blocks needed for growth. Once the acetate is absorbed, plants convert it into key compounds, such as sugars and amino acids, that are essential for their metabolism, cell division and overall growth. This tandem process significantly boosts the efficiency of acetate production, making it a more viable nutrient source for plants.

While the technology is still in its experimental phase, early studies have shown promising results. In lab settings, Jiao and his team have successfully grown plants using acetate as their primary carbon source, bypassing photosynthesis entirely. According to the study, a typical electro-agriculture system is estimated to be about three to seven stories high, depending on the type of food produced. On the roof are solar panels that provide renewable energy to the floor below, where the tandem electrolysis occurs. The acetate produced there is then supplied to the two to six floors below that, where the plants are grown.

So far, electro-agriculture has achieved success growing mushrooms, algae and yeast. The team’s current experiments are focused on tomatoes, lettuce and other small-scale crops, with hopes to extend to high-calorie crops like grains and sweet potatoes in the future. However, to succeed with these crops, the team must genetically modify them to metabolize acetate, a process that’s not yet possible for all plants. Acetate must be converted into usable energy for growth, and the team is working on enhancing plants’ ability to do this.

Electro-agriculture and food insecurity

One of the most compelling applications of electro-agriculture is its potential to alleviate food insecurity, particularly in regions where local food production is unsuccessful.

“We hope the technology can be implemented in locations where traditional agriculture is very difficult,” Jiao says. “Particularly concerning is climate change—places that used to be good land for growing things may not be possible in the future, so this may become a way to stabilize the food supply to the world.”

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization reports that the number of people facing hunger increased from about 581 million in 2019 to 733 million in 2023. Climate change is a contributing factor, with conditions like droughts, flooding and rising temperatures making traditional farming increasingly unsustainable. In Syria, prolonged droughts caused a dramatic 80 percent drop in wheat production in 2022 compared with 2020. In the American Midwest, extreme weather in 2019 brought 200 to 600 percent of the normal amount of rainfall, resulting in historic flooding and nearly 20 million acres of unplanted crops, setting a new record.

While progress has been made in addressing food insecurity over the past several decades, experts note that recent years have shown a slowdown in improvements, especially in urban areas.

“The past ten years has not seen much progress in terms of key food security measures,” says David Lobell, the director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University. “Persistent poverty is the most pressing problem in urban areas.”

According to the United States Department of Agriculture, approximately 53.6 million people in the U.S. live in low-income and low-access areas, where ways to obtain nutritious food are limited. When these areas occur in cities, they’re often known as urban food deserts—and electro-agriculture could have a significant impact there. Without land, water and sunlight as constraints, electro-agriculture could bring food production straight to cities, reducing the reliance on long-distance transportation and improving food accessibility.

But some experts are skeptical of electro-agriculture’s ability to be a large-scale solution to food insecurity. According to Harold van Es, an expert on soil and water management at Cornell University, the question of whether this technology will be effective is still “up in the air.”

“Does it actually solve a problem, or is it just a novel way of growing plants?” he asks. “It’s not going to solve the global food shortage issues because it’s too complex and probably too inefficient from a financial perspective.”

Challenges of scaling electro-agriculture

Despite electro-agriculture’s potential, several challenges must be addressed before it can be scaled globally. One of the most significant obstacles is the immense energy demand of the process. Electro-agriculture relies on electricity to drive the chemical reactions that nourish plants, and scaling this process to feed large populations would require an enormous amount of power.

According to the November study, feeding the entire U.S. population using electro-agriculture would require about 19,600 terawatt hours per year to produce 1.1 billion tons of acetate using the current tandem electrolysis technology. To put this into perspective, this amount of energy is roughly five times the current total electricity consumption of the entire U.S., which is about 4,000 terawatt hours per year. This would necessitate building an entirely new renewable electricity infrastructure far beyond anything in place today.

“We have to cut down the energy consumption of the whole system and boost the energy efficiency of the system in order to lower the cost and make the technology actually affordable,” Jiao says.

The electricity required for electro-agriculture is not only a technical hurdle, but also a logistical one. While renewable energy sources, such as solar power, could offer a solution, the availability and infrastructure for such energy sources are unevenly distributed around the globe.

As Tammara Soma, an expert in food systems planning and sustainability, points out, reliable access to power remains a luxury in some regions of the world.

“I have collaborations in East Africa, and in some areas, electricity is difficult to begin with,” Soma says. “A lot of people don’t even have electricity for their homes, so I can see that being very challenging.”

And in urban areas, the demand for electricity is already substantial, with cities consuming a significant portion of global energy. Urban areas account for approximately 75 percent of global primary energy consumption, according to data from the U.N. Adding the adoption of technologies like electro-agriculture could place additional strain on existing electrical grids without substantial infrastructure upgrades.

Furthermore, the energy source for electro-agriculture plays a critical role in its environmental footprint. “If there’s a mixture of solar, communities might integrate some solar power into that and it might be a possibility,” says Soma. But many regions still rely on fossil fuels to generate electricity, which could undermine the environmental benefits of using electro-agriculture.

“In many places, the electricity itself is not generated from sustainable resources, it’s generated from fossil fuels,” Soma says. “If implemented without thinking about context, the source of the energy, the types of materials used to create the infrastructure to actually run this, it can also do more harm than good.”

Environmental and ethical considerations

Beyond energy and accessibility, electro-agriculture also raises important environmental and ethical questions. While the technology could significantly reduce the amount of land used for food production—freeing up space for reforestation and other environmental restoration efforts—the resources it would require to build and run the infrastructure could be significant.

“I think what’s really important to always consider when it comes to agri-tech innovation is: What are the potential externalities?” Soma says. “What’s the true cost of technology?”

Electro-agriculture may be seen as a more efficient alternative to traditional photosynthesis, but the food systems expert points out that photosynthesis is a naturally occurring process that is free and accessible to everyone.

Beyond its environmental impact, the success of electro-agriculture will also depend on consumer acceptance. As Jiao acknowledges, one of the key hurdles for the technology is demonstrating to the public that the food produced through electro-agriculture is safe to consume.

“If you say, ‘I produced mushrooms, but in a slightly different way,’ people may have concerns if the mushroom is still safe to consume,” Jiao explains. “This is something we are actively trying to work with food safety experts on and trying to look into what kind of nutrition we have in that mushroom we produce in this method compared to the traditional pathways.”

Looking ahead

As electro-agriculture continues to develop, experts are identifying its most promising applications. For instance, van Es believes the technology could be particularly useful in urban environments, where space is limited but demand for specialty crops is high. He envisions it working well in settings like vertical farming, an industry that is growing rapidly with global market projections reaching billions of dollars in the coming years. The global vertical farming market size was valued at $6.92 billion in 2023, and it is projected to grow 20.1 percent by 2030.

Vertical farming uses controlled environments to grow crops indoors without sunlight, relying instead on LED lights. The plants are typically grown on floor-to-ceiling racks to maximize space, especially in urban environments. In New York City, for example, a 15,000-square-foot rooftop greenhouse in Brooklyn produces over 100,000 pounds of vegetables per year.

However, Jiao points out that the cost of vertical farming is very high because “the crops actually reject most of the light.”

He adds, “Their efficiency to utilize the light is pretty low, and that’s a high energy cost. With the new technology, we can cut down the involvement of light, and that will actually significantly improve the efficiency and lower the energy cost of the business.”

Soma shares a similar vision as van Es, but she emphasizes that electro-agriculture should not be viewed as a replacement for traditional farming. Instead, she sees it as a complementary technology that enhances existing systems.

“Where I see the most potential with something like this is with vertical agriculture and a lot of other controlled agriculture environments,” she says. “Those are usually in places like warehouses, in spaces in urban areas in industrial zones where they’re not using it anymore.”

She also notes that the technology could be explored for more unconventional applications, such as for supplementing nutrition in space.

Despite the challenges, researchers remain optimistic about the future of electro-agriculture. As Jiao and his team continue to refine the technology, they are hopeful that within the next two years, they will achieve “significant development in the field.”

Ella Jeffries | READ MORE

Ella Jeffries is an editorial intern with Smithsonian magazine.