Sound Treatment for Wheat

They laughed when an Illinois farmer reported that he had significantly increased his crop yield by serenading corn plants with Rhapsody in Blue. And few believed Indian Botanist T.C.N. Singh when he said that a shrill electric bell speeded the germination of seeds and that classical Indian violin and flute selections promoted crop growth. Or the Australian fruit farmer who swore that he had raised bigger and better bananas by bombarding them with a loud, constant bass note broad cast from loudspeakers set up among the trees.

Now it appears that the much-derided sonic treatment of crops may indeed be a sound agricultural technique. A Canadian woman scientist working under carefully controlled laboratory conditions has found that sound-treated wheat seedlings grow three times as large as those given conventional care.

Piped & Repiped. When she first read scientific reports about the crop experiments in India, University of Ottawa Biologist Pearl Weinberger was amused and unimpressed; apparently none of the Indian work had been performed with the use of proper laboratory controls, and the reports carried no statistical analysis of the results Dr. Weinberger's curiosity was aroused enough to lead her to sound experiments of her own.

Working under a grant from Canada s National Research Council, she placed chilled, water-soaked wheat seed in chambers that provide optimum light temperature and humidity for growth' Into all but the experimental control chambers she piped continuous tones of either 5,000 or 12,000 cycles per second. Every week or two during their first eight weeks of growth, randomly selected seedlings were measured and weighed, and their roots, leaves and shoots counted. To decrease the chance error, the entire experiment was repeated ten times over a period of nearly two years.

Ripe for Profit. The results were impressive. Without exception, seedlings Rideau wheat (a winter variety) that were continuously exposed to 5,000-cycle sound exceeded the weight of control specimens by from 250% to 300% and developed nearly four times as many potentially grain-bearing shoots. Under 12,000-cycle sound, growth increased from 20% to 50%. Dr Weinberger admits that she is mystified by the increased growth; the energy supplied by the sound waves is far too slight to account for it She suggests, however, that the sound waves themselves may produce a resonant effect in the plant cells, enabling the energy to accumulate and affect the plant's metabolism.

This summer dry, sound-treated seeds be planted outside the laboratory on an experimental farm, where they will sprout, reach maturity and produce the grain yield per plant shows a substantial increase over plants from untreated seed, Dr.Weinberger be11eves, the time may be ripe for practical use of the sound technique For only $300, she says, a sma11 farmer could then buy an oscillator and a speaker to stimulate his wheat seed into highly profitable growth.

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