2025-2026 Organic Tomato Trial · Gov't of W. Australia
Vortex-only bed +23% yield, vortex plus scalar bed +141% yield, stem tissue Brix up 500 to 550%, all on 18% less water, with a 194% increase in water productivity over the control.
Conducted by Pamela Patane and Laurie Barnes, South Regional TAFE, Bunbury Campus. Equipment supplied by President Water, irrigation system supplied by RGD Corporation.
- LOCATION
- South Regional TAFE, Bunbury Campus, Western Australia (33.35°S, 115.64°E)
- PERIOD
- 15 weeks · 31 October 2025 to 13 February 2026
- EQUIPMENT
- PW75 Structured Water Vortex Generator, with an FG-200 scalar generator at 432Hz on bed 3
What the trial measured
Yield across the three beds
THE STANDOUT RESULT- Total yield over ten harvests: 17.16kg control, 21.15kg vortex, 41.38kg vortex plus scalar.
- That is a 23.25% increase for the vortex bed and a 141.14% increase for the vortex plus scalar bed, both against the control.
- Each bed held two Ox Heart and two Juane Flamme plants, so every total represents four plants.
- Each treatment is a single bed. There was no randomisation, no replication and no statistical testing, so these are indicative differences rather than statistically validated ones.
- Fruit from bed 3 was recorded as larger and darker red, with darker foliage and greater turgidity in both treated beds.
- Bed 2 lost one of its three irrigation emitters to a blockage during the campus Christmas shutdown, which the authors say may understate its result.
Water use and crop per drop
- Treated beds ran 9 minutes of daily irrigation against the control's 11 minutes, an 18.2% reduction set at the timer.
- Over the 106-day trial that is 954 minutes for each treated bed against 1,166 minutes for the control.
- Water productivity: 0.88 kg/hr control, 1.33 kg/hr vortex, 2.60 kg/hr vortex plus scalar.
- Crop per drop relative to the control: 1.51x for vortex, 2.95x for vortex plus scalar.
- The water reduction was a trial setting, not an outcome. Treatment and water volume were not independently isolated, which the authors record as a confounding variable.
- Irrigation duration stands in for volume because all beds shared identical delivery hardware. The authors recommend future work quantify litres per bed per cycle.
Soil biology
- Total microbial biomass at completion: 1,367 µg/g control, 2,599 µg/g vortex, 3,540 µg/g vortex plus scalar.
- That is 90.1% and 159.0% above the control respectively.
- The fungal to bacterial ratio moved from 0.3:1 in the control to 1.3:1 with vortex and 16.7:1 with vortex plus scalar.
- Bed 3 finished 94% fungal against the control's 22%.
- Measured with a Microbiometer Starter Kit PRO at trial completion only. No pre-trial baseline reading was taken, so the shift is inferred from the between-bed difference.
Fruit quality and plant health
- Stem tissue Brix on 10 December 2025: 0.5 control, 3.0 vortex, 3.25 vortex plus scalar.
- These are stem tissue readings taken on a single date, not fruit sugar measurements.
- The low control reading coincided with the onset of leaf-borne disease in that bed.
- Blossom end rot appeared only slightly in beds 1 and 2, less than in the previous year's planting.
- The authors recommend a more regimented approach to Brix monitoring, better correlated to plant health and yield, in future trials.
“Although some trial parameters differed from those used in the previous year, the results indicate that water treatment using vortex generators may substantially enhance organic tomato yields when compared with the control treatment.”
This one ran on ordinary municipal water in Western Australia, filtered for chlorine and chloramines, on organic beds with no synthetic amendments. If you grow under those constraints, the setup will look familiar.
The result to weigh is bed 2, the vortex-only bed. Twenty-three percent more fruit on eighteen percent less irrigation time, using the product President Water actually sells at scale. That bed also lost an emitter to a blockage over the Christmas shutdown, so if anything it is the conservative number in the trial.
Bed 3 is the one everybody will point at, and it deserves a careful read rather than a headline. It yielded two and a half times the control, but it ran a second technology on top of the vortex unit, it lost scalar power intermittently through the trial, and it is one bed with no replicate. The soil biology shift underneath it is striking. It is also measured once, at the end, with no baseline. Interesting is the right word. Proven is not.
What this trial cannot do is carry a production decision on its own, and its authors say so plainly. One bed per treatment, no randomisation, no statistics, and the treated beds deliberately received less water than the control, so the water variable and the treatment variable move together. SR TAFE recommends replicated trials across multiple beds and crop types with standardised irrigation volumes before broader claims are made. That recommendation is part of the finding, not a footnote to it.
Trial at a glance
- CROP
- Organic Solanum lycopersicum, Ox Heart and Juane Flamme, two of each per bed
- DESIGN
- Three raised steel beds, 2750mm x 750mm, one per treatment, no replication or randomisation
- TREATMENTS
- Bed 1 filtered water control, bed 2 filtered plus PW75 vortex, bed 3 filtered plus PW75 plus 432Hz scalar
- GROWING MEDIUM
- Soil from previous mustard cover crops, 20mm organic compost, 75mm straw mulch
- WATER
- Mains municipal water pre-filtered through GE DGD 50-5 sediment and Pentair CRFC radial flow cartridges
- IRRIGATION
- 19mm poly pipe, three emitters per bed, Rain Smart controller. 11 min/day control, 9 min/day treated
- NUTRITION
- Neutrog GoGo Juice at 40mL per 10L at planting and twice more, identical across beds. No synthetic amendments
- SOIL MONITORING
- Electronic soil meter most weeks: nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, EC, temperature, moisture
- SOIL BIOLOGY
- Microbiometer Starter Kit PRO at trial completion, biomass and fungal to bacterial ratio
- BRIX METHOD
- Stem tissue refractometer reading, single date, 10 December 2025
- STATISTICS
- None. No statistical testing was performed and none is claimed
- RAINFALL
- 30.8mm total across the trial period, from an on-site record
Verified by Pamela Patane, South Regional TAFE (corresponding author) · Laurie Barnes, South Regional TAFE.
Findings that cut against the headline. We publish them because a grower deciding on a retrofit deserves the whole picture.
- Single replicate per treatment, one bed each, with no randomisation and no statistical testing. The authors state the results are indicative and not statistically validated.
- The control received 11 minutes of daily irrigation against 9 minutes for the treated beds, so water volume and water treatment were not independently isolated. Every crop-per-drop figure carries that confound.
- Bed 2 lost one of three emitters to a blockage during the campus Christmas shutdown, confirmed by soil moisture data and video, reducing effective water delivery to part of the bed.
- Bed 3's scalar equipment lost power intermittently during the trial. Vortex treatment continued through those periods but scalar field generation did not.
- Planting ran four weeks later than the previous year, limiting season-over-season comparability.
- Soil biology was measured only at completion, with no pre-trial baseline for any bed.
- The trial authors note that scalar frequency and water structuring effects are not mechanisms with established support in mainstream soil or plant science, and recommend replicated controlled follow-up before production conclusions are drawn.
Read the underlying report
Every figure on this page is traceable to the documents below. Nothing is modelled, estimated, or extrapolated.
CITATIONPatane, P. and Barnes, L. (2026). Efficacy of Structured Water Vortex Generators and Scalar Frequency Enhancement on Yield, Fruit Quality, and Water Use Efficiency in Organic Tomato Production. South Regional TAFE, Bunbury Campus, Western Australia. 31 October 2025 to 13 February 2026.
President Water Company · presidentwater.com · 2025-2026 Organic Tomato Trial · Gov't of W. Australia, 15 weeks · 31 October 2025 to 13 February 2026