Darryl Lyons, co-founder and Chief Rainmaker at Rainstick, is at the forefront of agricultural technology, leveraging bioelectricity to significantly boost farm productivity. Rainstick’s innovative approach involves mimicking natural thunderstorms to generate electric fields and frequencies that stimulate plant growth.
Lyons’ journey into AgTech began from a desire to streamline labor on his parents’ farm, leading him to found his third agricultural technology company. This drive to integrate technology for efficiency is a core principle behind Rainstick.
Rainstick’s technology replicates the electric fields and frequencies naturally occurring during thunderstorms. These natural phenomena have been observed to influence plant growth. The company has developed technology to deliver these specific frequencies through electric fields directly into biological systems, initially focusing on seeds.
This innovative concept is deeply rooted in Lyons’ heritage as a proud Maiawali man. His tribe, known as rainmakers, observed and understood the influence of thunderstorms on crop growth for thousands of years. Lyons, as Chief Rainmaker, emphasizes the profound potential of First Nations knowledge to inspire new technologies that can address global challenges.
The frequencies used by Rainstick are part of what the company calls a ‘recipe,’ designed to elicit targeted biological responses. Different frequencies or combinations can promote specific outcomes, such as increased root or shoot growth. The aim is to apply this to agriculture to enhance profitability for farmers and accelerate growth in nature restoration efforts.
Rainstick, officially two years old, began as a garage project by Lyons and his tech co-founder, Mic Black. Their ‘aha moment’ came from discovering how various frequencies impact different biological systems. Recognizing the initial skepticism that might arise from their unique approach, the founders embraced it by hiring researchers and conducting rigorous scientific validation.
Over 18 months, the company treated numerous seeds and measured phenotypical traits and outcomes of over 100,000 seedlings, utilizing machine learning to expedite the analysis. This extensive data collection has helped convince the research community and industry of the technology’s validity, leading to increased interest and ongoing validation trials with commercial partners.
Rainstick operates within the emerging scientific field of bioelectricity, which is gaining global recognition for its potential impact over the coming decades. The company has amassed a significant database, with approximately 5-6 million data points on the effects of bioelectricity on plants. This extensive data is crucial for their participation in the AWS Compute for Climate Fellowship, where it is being integrated into models to understand these effects comprehensively.
The complexity of Rainstick’s research is immense, involving a selection from 50,000 frequencies, nine different waveforms, and time durations ranging from nanoseconds to a full day. This vast parameter space, combined with environmental data, plant growth information, genomic data, and epigenetic data, necessitates substantial computational power to identify optimal frequency combinations for desired outcomes, such as improved crop yield.
Lyons highlights the personal motivation behind Rainstick, stemming from his family’s experiences with drought and the observation that traditional knowledge is often underutilized in global farming practices. The company is currently focusing on tomatoes within the Compute for Climate fellowship, mapping genetic up and down-regulation from specific frequency suites. Early data suggests that more vigorous seedlings exhibit increased nitrogen and nutrient uptake, leading to better photosynthesis and improved nitrogen usage efficiency.
The application of machine learning is in its early stages for Rainstick, with the Compute for Climate program providing resources to develop models that combine theoretical physics, phenotypical data, epigenetic data, and genome data. This ambitious five-year journey aims to leverage massive agricultural datasets and potentially large language models (LLMs) to revolutionize farming practices.
Rainstick has established a unique framework to acknowledge and protect the traditional knowledge underpinning its technology. A special class of shares is dedicated to the Maiawali Foundation, ensuring that this indigenous heritage is recognized and preserved within the company’s deep tech venture, with all shareholders and customers agreeing to abide by this commitment.
The technology also presents potential risks and alternative applications. Certain frequency ‘recipes’ can hinder plant growth, while others have shown promise in inhibiting mold growth in mycelium and microbes, suggesting its potential for pest control.
Overcoming initial skepticism, particularly given the historical context of using electricity and frequencies for health or growth, required Rainstick to meticulously measure and present phenotypical outcomes. The extensive data from over 100,000 seedlings demonstrated tangible results, fostering interest and collaboration from the scientific and agricultural communities.
The company’s small team of five, including Mic Black, a tech co-founder with expertise in LLMs, and a physicist, is dedicated to building a ‘recipe engine.’ This engine will predict the optimal frequency recipe for specific species, varieties, and growth environments.
Within the three-month Compute for Climate fellowship, Rainstick aims to create a foundational recipe engine capable of predicting optimal recipes for three varieties of tomatoes to enhance nitrogen uptake efficiency. The long-term goal, over three to five years, is to expand this engine to multiple agricultural species, significantly contributing to sustainable agriculture by improving nitrogen-use efficiency and reducing environmental impact.
Beyond agriculture, Rainstick has secured a contract with a global mining company for mine restoration. This project involves working with native seeds in extremely dry environments like the Pilbara region of Australia, known for its challenging germination conditions. Lab work has already demonstrated the technology’s profound effect on these native seeds, with field trials set to commence. This represents another significant opportunity for the technology to contribute to nature restoration, even with limited genetic data available for many native species.
For more information about Rainstick, visit rainstick.com.au.
