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.

Comments

Grass

[DeBaas]

This time, however, fresh-cut grass was added to the growing medium.

Yes, we Dutch people have lot's of experience in adding grass into the mix...

Where will the fresh cut grass come from?

[Coisiche]

Ok, it's just an experiment using simulated soils, but if it were tried for real then getting fresh cut grass to either the Moon or Mars might prove problematical.

Re:Where will the fresh cut grass come from?

[Immerman]

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.

Re:Where will the fresh cut grass come from?

[Dunbal]

Not if you're taking biomass off every harvest. Oh sure you can put your waste back in, but nothing is 100% efficient.

Re:Where will the fresh cut grass come from?

[shadowrat]

hydroponics seems to be effective at growing a certain crop in berkeley. I bet you could grow it on mars as well. In fact, i think we can just go ahead and add that to the list of amazing benefits to this plant. not only does it cure everything, it enables us to live on mars!

Re:Where will the fresh cut grass come from?

[michelcolman]

You can grow grass by adding fresh cut tomatoes to the soil.

Re:Where will the fresh cut grass come from?

[Iamthecheese]

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

Not on Mars you can't. Martian soil is highly toxic and will have to be processed and separated before use as farmland.

Re:Where will the fresh cut grass come from?

[Immerman]

Perchlorates are indeed an issue, fortunately they're mostly water soluble which should make low-tech sand washing procedures quite viable so long as the colony is established near a plentiful water supply (which is probable anyway), or there's a similarly effective way to remove the perchlorates from the water for re-use. Evaporation maybe, it sounds like perchlorates tend to be salts, and I'm sure a concentrated supply of powerfully oxidizing salts would be useful stuff.

And once you get the concentration down to something the plants can survive... well, either they don't absorb it, in which case there's no problem. Or they *do* absorb it, in which case in relatively short order there's no more of it in your remediated soil and there's no more problem. And you can still use the contaminated biomass for first-stage soil enrichment of subsequent batches.

Or if you want to be clever, there's many microbes that use perchlorates as food, and microbes are practically the definition of exponential growth. With no native predators, let some loose in your perchlorate deposit and it won't be long before they're converting the perchlorates to biomass faster than you can shovel it off the ground.

Spoiler

[Ogive17]

Thank you for ruining the end of the movie for me!

Re:Spoiler

[Dunbal]

Well he gets rescued, and THEN he dies... er, spoiler alert?

Re:Spoiler

[__aaclcg7560]

Really, you work in production?

Nope. I've seen a lot of movies over the years. I make too much money as an I.T. tech in Silicon Valley to wait on tables in Hollywood.

Or just talk out your ass on a regular basis?

This is Slashdot. You must be new around here.

Huh?

[Rei]

The soil simulants were provided by NASA, with the moon soil actually coming from a desert in Arizona, and the Mars soil coming from a Hawaiian volcano

Huh? What kind of lousy "simulants" are those? Is Hawaiian volcano soil rich in perchlorates? Martian regolith is oxidizing enough that if you were playing around in it with your bare skin you'd get burns; it's similar to handling undiluted lye or bleach, highly destructive to organic matter.

It's also very corrosive just from abrasion, although lunar regolith is worse. Trivia for people here: how many vacuum-sealed samples of lunar regolith do you think we have left over from the Apollo days? Answer: none. The regolith abraded the seals over time, creating pinpoint leaks; every last sample is now partially oxidized by Earth air.

Additionally, both are believed to be very hazardous in terms of silicosis risk, akin to breathing what comes off of a rock crusher (Mars's is finer, but both are in the hazardous range). Martian regolith has some other nasty chemical surprises though (beyond the perchlorates)... among the contaminants that have been identified is what appears to be significant amounts of hexavalent chromium. That's the type of chromium almost never found in nature on Earth (because we live in an oxidizing environment) that's extremely toxic to people (think Erin Brockovich).

This isn't just Earth soil; it's a totally different beast.

Anyway, I'm not that big of a Mars fan... I'll take a colony on Venus any day over one on Mars. ;)

Re:Huh?

[Rei]

And beyond that, you don't need soil to grow plants. Hydroponics / aeroponics are pretty much perfectly suited for Mars agriculture - minimizing the water and nutrient loads needed.

Re:Huh?

[DerekLyons]

Trivia for people here: how many vacuum-sealed samples of lunar regolith do you think we have left over from the Apollo days? Answer: none. The regolith abraded the seals over time, creating pinpoint leaks; every last sample is now partially oxidized by Earth air.

Since the Lunar samples are stored under nitrogen to prevent exactly this occurrence, not buying it. Got a reference?

*rolls eyes*

[Notabadguy]

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.

Re:*rolls eyes*

[Notabadguy]

Not to mention FTFA:

The growing took place in a greenhouse with consistent temperature, humidity and light conditions, and under earth atmosphere. "This is because we expect that first crop growth on Mars and moon will take place in underground rooms to protect the plants from the hostile environment including cosmic radiation," says team member Dr. Wieger Wamelink.

And no, the harvested crops weren't eaten. The soils contained heavy metals such as lead, arsenic and mercury, and there were concerns that these could be taken up by the plants.

Re:*rolls eyes*

[SydShamino]

There's no indication that Martian soil contains those toxins. They used volcanic soil so that it would be free of microbes and biomatter; the toxins were a side effect of that, not necessarily a reflection of the soil expected on Mars.

Re:Missing ingredients

[__aaclcg7560]

Not for growing tomatoes. My grandfather told me the secret of good tomatoes is a good piss. Every time we checked out the tomatoes in the garden, he would whip out his big penis and urinate at the base of the tomato plants.

Comment

[WallyL]

So they literally scienced the shit out of it?

Who needs soil?

[wwalker]

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?

Re:Waste of money

[michelcolman]

Actually, one of the most important areas of study would precisely be trying to grow plants there. What else are they going to do all day? Make sandcastles? Once they've analyzed the soil, there's not really that much to study. Staying alive, growing stuff and producing energy, those are the things they will be most interested in.

It isn't soil if it is only inorganic.

[dsmatthews9379]

There is no such thing as soil on Mars or the Moon, soil contains humic acids (and their salts) plus glomalin and the numerous fungi that produce it. Not only do these clowns not know what soil is, they don't even seem to realise that you don't need to use soil to grow plants. What they need is the ability to inoculate a substrate with an ecosystem and keep it in balance, then the rest just happens naturally. What they should be looking at is how to use a solar furnace to convert extraterran regoliths into the equivalent of expanded clay beads or vermiculite etc. which can then be inoculated with an aquaponics ecosystem.

It's only soil if it has mechanical properties

[Overzeetop]

Naw, what you're describing is Dirt. Soil is what we build buildings on and it had defined engineering properties such as internal friction angles, various moduli of elasticity and compression, and other useful things. (aka, each discipline has it's own definition of what "soil" is - and to CEs it has nothing to do with biology ;-)