Greenhouse technologies
Once bacteria are happily growing away under a martian sky, they will provide nutrients needed to support luxurious crops of plants. A martian city could be imagined as a lush green place, with hydroponics and soil-bound crops filling tunnels, carpeting domed craters and growing away in every unused corner.
Advanced greenhouse technologies — like vertical agriculture — that create a suitable controlled environment will provide abundant leafy greens, vegetables, fruits and specialty crops such as herbs, coffee and chocolate.
Carbohydrates might be in short supply, however, as they take up large amounts of space. Our grain consumption is likely to be lower on Mars, though legumes and grains will still appear in martian diets in smaller quantities reflecting what can economically be produced on site.
These technologies are also valuable on Earth as we attempt to shorten supply chains and improve the availability of healthy fruit and vegetables in the winter months.
Meat on Mars?
Animal agriculture is notoriously inefficient. On Earth, billions of domestic animals threaten natural biodiversity, contribute to climate change and suffer from needless animal cruelty.
Animal-based systems will not be viable on Mars, but protein could be abundantly produced through cellular agriculture and precision fermentation. Precision fermentation involves creating proteins by utilizing modified yeasts, fungus and bacteria that consume starches and sugars — on Mars, this will largely come from food waste — and turn them into desired proteins.
Cellular agriculture involves taking stem cell samples and growing them in the lab to create cuts of meat identical to those from animal agriculture.
Reducing inefficiencies
Imagining what agriculture could be like on Mars is a fascinating project, but it’s when we think about how these technologies may affect life on Earth that this topic becomes extremely serious. This is because on Mars — where each gram of organic matter, millilitre of water and photon of solar energy is scarce — there can be no inefficiencies.
The “waste” products of one part of the system need to be deliberately used as inputs into another part, such as using the dead cyanobacteria as a growth medium for later parts of the food system. But more than the technologies themselves, it may be the mindset of building a martian food system that will change how things are done here on Earth, where one-third of all food is thrown away.
Our excitement about food technologies comes through in Dinner on Mars, but we are not techno-optimists. Technology isn’t a panacea. For example, if technologies like vertical farming reduce the need for farmland, then policies are required to ensure that the land will not just be paved over.
We also need to be mindful of the negative impacts of technologies, and be sensitive to how people’s livelihoods may need to change and adapt. Helping manage this transition and minimize disruption is another important area for policy.
The technologies unlocked by Mars, together with equitable policies, could place us on a much more sustainable trajectory on Earth.
Lenore Newman, Director, Food and Agriculture Institute, University of The Fraser Valley and Evan Fraser, Director of the Arrell Food Institute and Professor in the Dept. of Geography, Environment and Geomatics, University of Guelph
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
