Researchers Find Genius Solution to Kill Weeds Without Chemicals — and It Involves Electric Current

Weeds are among those plants that are negative and unwanted. But they are inevitable, unrestrained. While you plant a flower bed or a cluster of herbs, you can’t stop them from sticking out their tips in between. Even when you rip them out, they are notorious enough to re-grow and invade the nutrient stores in the soil bed. Gardeners employ all kinds of tactics to kill these intrusive weeds, but as it turns out, it isn’t that easy. Did you know electricity can help? In a study published in the journal Weed Science, two researchers from Western Australia reported that weeds can be removed by blasting them with an electric current.

The magic of electric weed control

The technology of electric weed control works in the same way as your microwave oven. It relies on the physical contact between the plants and the electrodes. Using the mechanical energy of a tractor, the electric weeders unleash a flaming death upon the weeds by desiccating them into a persistent dehydration. The weed zapper is often attached to a tractor. As the tractor rolls on the garden bed, the circuit shoots bursts of electric current onto the bed, thus killing weeds.

The terminator of weeds 

Once the current is ejected from the electrodes and it flows through the weedy plants, it heats up the molecules of water lingering in the roots. Just as a microwave causes a bowl of soup to whiff out steam, the intense heat generated by this current turns the water in the weed’s body into steam. Eventually, the steam evaporates. Due to the lack of water, the tissues are scorched away into ashy powder, and the cell walls get ruptured.

A team led by Catherine Borger and Miranda Slaven implemented the electric weed control method at four commercial vineyards near Yallingup, a cool‑climate wine region south of Perth, Western Australia, during two consecutive spring seasons in 2022 and 2023. Since each of these sites was bustling with invasive weeds, it provided them with the perfect opportunity to test out their hypothesis.

They employed an XPower System from Zasso, a company that combines advanced power electronics and state-of-the-art engineering to support electric weeding and promote a chemical-free world. At the time of the experiment, the sites they chose were teeming with annual grasses like the rigid, papery ryegrass, the reddish-purple veldtgrass, the meaty-textured legumes, and the hardy kikuyu. They attached Zasso’s device to a tractor and launched it to roll over the plots selected in the vineyard.  

Electric weeding is the winner 

The test was conducted from the time of budbreak to when the shoots were approximately 10 centimetres long during the growth stage. On some patches of the yards, they applied the commonly used “glyphosate spraying” and “mowing” techniques to kill the weeds. The goal was to compare these traditional weed-killing methods against the electric weed control technology. Five weeks later, they harvested the biomass and analysed the results of the three weed-killing methods. The contrast was unsurprisingly simple. The electric weeding method was the clear winner. It succeeded in eradicating around 84 to 87 percent of the weed mass. Mowing was a runner-up with 65 percent success.

“Here, we show for the first time that electric weed control in viticulture has comparable efficiency to that achieved by herbicides. Electric weed control will be of particular importance for those where herbicide resistance is increasingly problematic and for organic growers,” Borger said in a press release. Multiple NDVI scans indicated that none of the grapevines were getting injured by the electric current. The electric method seemed to puncture the plant tissues and burn their roots in a way that chemicals cannot. 

More on Green Matters

Bleach Can Kill Even the Most Stubborn Weeds — but Experts Warn About Its Scary Side Effects

Gardeners Are Pouring Boiling Water to Kill Weeds — but Experts Reveal the Right Way of Doing So

This Handy Weeding Tool Has Been Martha Stewart’s Favorite Since 1980 — Now, It’s Available for $24