ABOUT KLÄ’ONE
We started this because we didn't trust what was in our food anymore.
A few of the same companies that own the pharmaceutical industry also own most of the chemical fertilizer industry. Klēone exists because we wanted to grow food without buying from any of them.
A 100-year-old patent the chemical industry tried to bury.
In 2024 we got tired of reading the back of fertilizer bags. The list of chemicals on the label got longer every year and the soil we'd been growing on for a decade was getting worse, not better. We started looking for an older way to do this.
What we found was a French inventor named Justin Christofleau. He patented a copper garden antenna in 1920. By 1928 a hundred thousand farmers across Europe were using his method to grow without synthetic fertilizer, and his instruction manuals were outselling every other agricultural book on the continent. By 1932 the chemical fertilizer industry had taken him to court and won the right to suppress his work for the next eighty years.
His books were pulled from print, his patents archived, his name almost erased from the agricultural record.
We spent the next year tracking down his original manuals and learning to wind copper the way he did. The first Klēone antenna was made on a kitchen table in Indianapolis.
Hand-wound in Indianapolis.
We make every Klēone antenna by hand at our workshop in Indianapolis. Solid 99.9% pure copper from base to coil. No plating, no fillers. Each antenna is wound, finished, and inspected at the bench in about 22 minutes. We've never machine-pressed one and we never will. Every order ships with a small batch card initialed by whoever made it.
A garden tool you have to refill every season isn't a tool, it's a subscription. If we wanted to sell you something you had to keep buying, we'd be selling fertilizer.
We're not done looking.
Christofleau wrote eleven books across his career. We've translated three so far. The remaining eight sit on a shelf in our workshop, two of them in regional French dialects we're still working through. Beyond his work there are dozens of pre-1930 gardening methods that disappeared the same way his did, quietly, in court, replaced by something somebody could sell you every season.
The old methods weren't replaced because they didn't work. They were replaced because nobody could patent dirt and sunlight.