QUANTUM-RESONANT ENERGY COUPLING IN AGRICULTURE (QREC-AGRI): A FALSIFIABLE MULTISCALE FRAMEWORK FOR TESTING NON-CONTACT EFFECTS IN PLANT-SOIL-WATER SYSTEMS

Agriculture increasingly requires interventions that improve yield stability, resource-use efficiency and stress resilience without proportionally increasing chemical or energetic inputs. Quantum-Resonant Energy Coupling for Agriculture (QREC-Agri) is a proposed remote, non-contact intervention whose initiating physical mechanism is presently unresolved. Rather than infer mechanism from outcome, this article develops a falsifiable framework that separates four evidentiary layers: agronomic efficacy, biological mediation, physical coupling and quantum-mechanistic attribution. At the efficacy stage, QREC-Agri is treated as a black-box randomised intervention with auditable assignment and timing. Candidate biological responses are anchored to established plant processes, including photosynthetic excitation and electron transfer, proton-coupled electron transfer, enzyme-catalysed hydrogen transfer, radical-pair chemistry, membrane and aquaporin transport, electrical/Ca2+ /reactive-oxygen signalling and rhizosphere-mediated nutrient acquisition. We formalise competing null, classical-pathway, unresolved-coupling and mechanism-specific hypotheses; derive prospective pathway-level predictions and falsifiers; define a causal estimand; and specify safeguards against pseudoreplication, spatial interference, selective reporting and post hoc configuration changes. The validation architecture requires pre-registration, sham assignment, blinded outcome assessment, treatment-fidelity auditing, independent replication, equivalence testing against a smallest agronomically meaningful effect and, for mechanism claims, a prospectively specified physical observable that discriminates competing models. The framework is intentionally asymmetric: positive phenotypes may justify further study, but quantum attribution is permitted only after reproducible efficacy, biological pathway localisation, exclusion or modelling of sufficient classical explanations and direct mechanism-specific evidence. Although developed around QREC-Agri, the framework is generalisable to remote or non-contact biological interventions for which exposure metrology is incomplete. Its purpose is to convert an unconventional technology proposition into a sequence of experiments capable of confirmation, refinement or rejection.