As far as I am aware, a plant does not have a magnetic field of any significant magnitude.
What I wonder is, is there any electromagnetic related basis for the crop spraying technique outlined in the science section of a generally highly regarded newspaper and listed below. If the idea was not associated with a university, I would not be asking the question.
Irish Times Crop Spraying Article :
...is a magnetic spraying technology that helps farmers grow more by using less. The system, which has been three years in development, gives better coverage than conventional crop spraying systems and also reduces spray drift by more than 80 per cent. [The company} is based at NovaUCD, (University College Dublin) the university’s centre for new ventures.
“The technology is based around attaching magnetic inserts onto a sprayer which sends an electromagnetic charge into the sprayed liquid,” “All living plants and soil have a magnetic field so the magnetically charged liquid is attracted to its target. The benefits of our technology include increased profitability, increased productivity and better environmental performance.” The company has worked closely with UCD to develop its system which has also been independently tested as far afield as Ethiopia, Kenya and the US.
However, this study, Plant's magnetic field strength is less than a millionth of Earths. seems, to me at least, to make the whole idea a non starter.
In an article in the Journal of Applied Physics, the UC Berkeley scientists describe.. their ultimate failure to detect a magnetic field. They established, however, that the plant generated no magnetic field greater than a millionth the strength of the magnetic field surrounding us here on Earth.
I appreciate that this may turn out to be a biology based question, but I can't immediately see, from a physics point of view, how this scheme could possibly work.
