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Dutch Researchers Grow Crops In Simulated Lunar and Martian Soil (blastingnews.com)
MarkWhittington writes: When people start living on the moon and Mars on a permanent basis, they are going to need to grow their own crops to produce food to eat. Indeed, in the recent hit movie, "The Martian," Matt Damon's character grew potatoes to survive long enough to be rescued. With that in mind, researchers at Wageningen University in the Netherlands have been trying to grow crops in simulated lunar and Martian soil. The first attempt was not successful. The second, however, proved to have promising results.
Now we know how to grow food on Mars!
Step 1: Be on Earth, with Earth Gravity.
Step 2: Grow your food in an oxygenated, normal earth atmosphere.
Step 3: Build a big warehouse, climate controlled, not subjected to martian weather or extremes.
Step 4: Use desert soil.
Step 5: When all of that fails, add fresh compost and grass, with plenty of water.
I'm not sure how any of this works as "simulated" lunar and martian soil. If they had taken inert soil, or diatomaceous earth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatomaceous_earth)....that would have been a start.
Not really, unless you want to start a full-scale farm on day 1. You could easily bring a bit of potting soil and some seeds for fast-growing grass to get started, preferably something that can spread through the roots instead of only by seed. Trim the grass regularly to maintain maximum growth rate, and use it to enrich additional soil for the grass to spread into. It may take a while to enrich enough soil to start farming, but you're dealing with exponential growth so it will happen a lot faster than you might expect. Plan it right, and by the time you have your first pressurized greenhouse constructed you'll be ready to seed a substantial fraction of it with grass right away, and by the time you have your second greenhouse constructed you should have plenty of grass to enrich the soil immediately.
Choose your grass wisely, and it will be an effective oxygen producer while it's busy enriching your soil. Take the right grass and/or companion microbes to break down cellulose into something we can digest and you can even eat the grass while waiting for your more nutritious crops to grow. I wonder how difficult it would be to make an artificial "cow stomach" bioreactor? After all cows don't actually digest grass, they digest the microbes that digest the chewed grass.
And of course you don't actually need soil at all - you could start out growing grass hydroponically. Hydroponics has much higher infrastructure requirements that make it unattractive for large-scale usage in resource constrained environments, but a small scale facility could be a viable epicenter for staring "keystone" plant populations.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Technically, you don't need soil to grow something. It's called hydroponics. In an emergency situation (The Martian), yes, it's easier to use soil, as you don't need as much water, no pumps, timers, etc. But if you are planning for it, why not go for pure hydroponics?