Lightning-inspired fertilizer could ease global supply crisis for Canadian farmers

Canadian farmers facing fertilizer shortages are watching an emerging technology that sounds like it belongs in a novelty globe: cold plasma fertilizers made by replicating lightning. About one-third of the world's fertilizer ships through the Strait of Hormuz, where traffic has been severely restricted since March. Iran, a major fertilizer and nitrogen producer, has been damaged by airstrikes.

The result: fertilizer prices have spiked sharply. "Expenses are exceeding revenues this year, and that's not a pretty picture for farmers," said Jeff Harrison, chair of Grain Farmers of Ontario. The cold plasma method works by putting energy into liquids and gases to convert them into plasma—the same state as lightning and the northern lights.

Lightning naturally converts nitrogen in the air into a form plants can absorb. That combines with rainwater to create nitric acid, falling as liquid fertilizer. Machines made by U.S. company Green Lightning are the most widely distributed in Canada, sold here by Nytro Ag Corp., run by Saskatchewan farmer Chris Nykolaishen.

Since starting in 2024, he has sold about 200 Green Lightning machines to 82 farms—a small fraction of Canada's 189,874 farms counted in the last census. The most common system, the Thunder 365, costs $66,500. It stands nearly two metres high and about 1.2 metres wide and deep.

A plasma reactor inside creates colourful lightning that breaks apart nitrogen molecules into nitrous oxide, which is then infused into water to make nitric acid—liquid fertilizer. Nykolaishen recommends farmers start with a small trial and familiarize themselves with specifications, including the need for a reverse-osmosis system to filter water. Research is in early stages and has not yet been peer-reviewed, though the method is being explored as a potential way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from traditional chemical fertilizers.