A key finding to help farmers in drought-affected areas have been discovered by a year nine student.
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Jarroch Maywald's project, Structured water and its effect on wheat growth, may help farmers keep their plants alive, with very little water.
"The research for this experiment, if what I found is true, this may be able to help people in drought-affected areas. If you don't have a lot of water and you just need your plants to survive this may be a way to help," he said.
He said his research started before he even had an investigation idea.
"I came to find some interesting university studies, one of them said that structured water, which is water that has undergone some kind of agitation, so whether that be passing through marbles, magnetised or whipped up in a vortex. The study said this would have a profound impact on plant germination and growth and other studies have noted that it would have no impact whatsoever. I wanted to know which one was right.
Jarroch and his dad created a device out of PVC pipe, which allowed the water to pass through marbles, maginites and a vortex. This allowed him to test all the different structured waters individually.
"What was quite interesting was at the start of the experiment, the control was the best, the water that hadn't gone through any form of structure, grew the quickest and was the best in pretty much every way. But the interesting part I found... is that some of the control plants started to die while the structured water plants continued to grow.
"As the experiment continued to go further, the control continued to go downhill, while the other plants continued to grow.
Jarroch said more tests were needed to prove his claim.
"There may be a correlation between the structuring devices not helping the quick germination and growth of the plants but helping them to be able to sustain life while under stress.
"I'm not a scientist, but I thought I might be able to make that claim due to the results I found."