Brandie Weikle’s June 21, 2026 article for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Radio programme What on Earth explains how the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz has affected Canadian agriculture and the reasons for how that may lead to new fertilizer technology adoption, Note Links have been removed,

It sounds like weird science and some have dismissed it as “snake oil.”

But an emerging crop fertilizer technology is gaining interest amid an acute shortage caused by wars in the Middle East. Though research is in early stages and has not yet been peer-reviewed, the method is also being explored as one possible way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from traditional chemical fertilizers.

The cold plasma method essentially replicates lightning, similar to the novelty lightning globes popular in the ’90s.

The fertilizer is made on site at individual farms, a potential advantage as geopolitical conflicts disrupt supply.

About one-third of the world’s fertilizer is shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, where traffic has been severely restricted since the beginning of March [2026]. Compounding the problem, Iran is a major producer of fertilizer and nitrogen, and its industry has been damaged by airstrikes.

Jeff Harrison, chair of Grain Farmers of Ontario, said that has pushed fertilizer prices sharply higher.

“Expenses are exceeding revenues this year, and that’s not a pretty picture for farmers,” said Harrison, who grows corn and soybeans in Quinte, about 100 kilometres from Kingston, Ont. 

Weikle’s June 21, 2026 article provides scientific details about ‘lightning fertilizer’,

To understand how cold plasma fertilizer works, it helps to get a handle on the vocabulary. Plasma is a word used to describe a component in your blood, but it has a different meaning in physics.

“If you put energy into liquids, you can make them gaseous,” said Stephan Reuter, a professor of plasma physics from Polytechnique Montréal who is researching plasma fertilizer. “And if you put more energy into these gases, you can transfer these gases into a plasma.”

Lightning is plasma. The northern lights are plasma. The little shock you get when you walk across a carpet and then touch a light switch is plasma, he said.

Lightning is a natural fertilizer because its energy converts nitrogen in the air into a form plants can absorb, Reuter told What on Earth. That combines with rainwater to make nitric acid, and falls onto soil as liquid fertilizer.

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Next, Weikle’s June 21, 2026 article covers the current situation in Canada, Note: Links have been removed,

A couple of different North American manufacturers are making devices that mimic this process. 

Machines made by U.S. company Green Lightning are the most widely distributed in Canada. They are sold here by Nytro Ag Corp., run by Chris Nykolaishen, a farmer who grows wheat and canola near Kamsack, Sask.

Since starting in 2024, he said he has sold about 200 Green Lightning machines to 82 farms. Some larger farms have bought two or more machines, but that is a small group among the 189,874 farms counted in Canada’s last census. 

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The most common Green Lightning system, the Thunder 365, is not quite two metres high and about 1.2 metres wide and deep. Nykolaishen said it costs $66,500.

A plasma reactor inside each machine creates the kind of colourful lightning seen in novelty globes. From there, it breaks apart nitrogen molecules to make nitrous oxide, Nykolaishen said.

That is sent into a special chamber, where it is infused into water to make nitric acid, becoming liquid fertilizer.

Nykolaishen recommends farmers start with a small trial in their first season and get to know the specifications, including the need for a reverse-osmosis system to filter the water.

Hard-won cynicism

That cautious approach is more appealing for farmers, he said, because many “look at this as if it’s snake oil.” The cynicism is hard won, he said.

“There’s been a lot of things that have come through agriculture that just haven’t worked out.”

For those who do make the leap, Nykolaishen said the system can produce 36,500 gallons (about 140,000 litres) of fertilizer a year if run continuously. That is enough to fertilize 1,000 acres (400 hectares) of wheat and canola with no other fertilizer, or a larger farm when combined with other products.

Each season, the farmers he works with are refining the system, but they need more data.

“The hard thing about agriculture is you really only get one shot at R&D every year, so you gotta make sure you make it count,” he said. 

Reuter’s team at Polytechnique Montréal has funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to test cold plasma fertilizer. He said it is the only team in the country doing so.

The group is testing the fertilizer in a greenhouse setting on hydroponic lettuce. The findings are relevant, Reuter said, but not an apples-to-apples comparison for soil in a field of wheat or corn.

A credible “tutorial review” explaining the cold plasma method and its potential advantages was published in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s journal RSC Sustainability in 2025, but the research is so new there are not yet peer-reviewed studies.

There are also questions about how well the system will work at scale and integrate with existing farm equipment, since many farms use rigs designed to spread dry, granular fertilizer, not liquid.

But that wasn’t a problem on the Yorkton, Sask., farm near the Manitoba border where Jordan Keep and his business partner tried the system for the first time last year.

“We were already running liquid fertilizer, so we didn’t have to change much in terms of our seeding equipment,” he said.

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Climate benefits are covered in Weikle’s June 21, 2026 article, which also features an embedded radio segment (27 mins. 49 secs.) about ‘lightning fertilizer’ and Canadian agriculture.

620 CKRM: The Voice of Saskatchewn offers both a radio segment and an online January 19, 2026 article by Kevin Hursh featuring Chris Nykolaishen and lightning fertilizer,

The idea of farmers making their own liquid nitrogen fertilizer on-farm with a system called Green Lightning has been around for a few years and it continues to expand.

The Canadian distributor is a family business called Nytro based in Kamsack. Nytro had a booth at the Western Canadian Crop Production Show in Saskatoon [Saskatchewan] last week and will have a booth at Manitoba Ag Days in Brandon [Manitoba] this week.

The Green Lightning theory is the same as how a lightning storm creates some nitrogen that falls with the rain. In this case, electricity is the lightning that produces nitrogen within water. The basic Green Lightning factory has been a six-head unit making 100 gallons a day using about $4 worth of electricity.

A larger, insulated unit within a 10-foot sea can is now available. It can generate 500 gallons of product a day with an electrical cost of $30 to $35 a day.

President of Nytro Chris Nykolaishen says the nitrogen content is equivalent to 3 pounds of N per gallon of water.

“We’ve done replicated plot trials to see if that is an effective rate in which you could use it, and the trials have been positive,” said Nykolaishen, “It’s difficult to measure because of the lack of salt in the product, but we’re using a TDS meter, and with the lab that we use, we’ve developed a formula that you can easily determine the amount of nitrogen you have in the product based on a parts per million basis.”

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Currently, 65 farmers across Canada use the machines, he added.

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Cost is the big driver. The Green Lightning price per pound of nitrogen is far less than conventional fertilizer, even after factoring in the capital cost of the units.

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Weikle’s June 21, 2026 article notes this cautious response from the federal government,

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In an email to CBC, Agriculture and Agri-food Canada (AAFC) said it recognizes innovation will play a role in the future of fertilizer use in Canada, and that plasma-based fertilizers have the potential to improve efficiency and reduce environmental impacts.

“At the same time, conventional fertilizers and manure continue to play a critical and indispensable role in supporting crop production, food security, and farm productivity in Canada,” the email said.

In response to a question about how AAFC will help farmers cope with the current fertilizer shortage, the statement said, in part, that it’s working with partners to “identify supply pressures ahead of the 2027 growing season.”

I did a little bit of digging and found a little more about Stephan Reuter and his work (from his Polytechnique Montréal profile page),

Stephan Reuter is an assistant professor in physics of plasmas and spectroscopy.

He is also Head of TransMedTech [chair for plasma medicine].

His research involves the interaction of non-thermal plasmas with liquids and diagnostic methods such as ultrafast laser spectroscopy, spectral imaging, and single-shot techniques.
Studied application fields are plasmas for medicine, environment, and material synthesis.

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Plasma for Infinitesimal Reactions

Plasma (singular state of the matter, lightning is a common example) are able to generate highly reactive species at low temperature. They are qualified as excited. Generate those reactive species help to induce chemical reactions at low temperature, which couldn’t happen in the wanted conditions. In low-temperature plasma, there are highly reactive species -electrons, and other «cold» molecules. The results are unbalanced medium and a loss in thermodynamic equilibrium.

Thus, it’s possible to create chemical reactions in new media such as microorganisms, living and non-living (nano-scaled structures). More precisely, those researches are focused on the plasma-liquid interfaces of plasma sources.

Nano-magic for lab/living and society

The principal purpose is to advance plasma medicine for diagnostic, medical care, food safety or materials.

According to recent developments in science, Pr Reuter’s approach follows sustainable development principles at the economic scale (positive economic impact), social (health) and environment (responsible plasma sources).

As for TransMedTech, there’s this on its About page,

History

Officially launched in 2017, the Institut TransMedTech (iTMT) is a transdisciplinary open collaboration initiative that aims to develop innovative medical technologies to meet the needs of the healthcare community and train the next generation of the medical technology sector.

The Institut TransMedTech was born of an initiative led by Polytechnique Montréal, with the collaboration of 4 other founding institutions (CHU Sainte-Justine, Université de Montréal, CHUM, Jewish General Hospital of Montreal) and some 30 other partners. Three other institutions joined in 2023: HEC Montréal, the Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal (IUGM) and the Montreal Heart Institute (MHI).

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Lightning as fertilizer? What an extraordinary time we live in.