A new study has found some very hopeful news for our descendants who will one day be colonizing Mars: The atmosphere of the Red Planet is idea for farming, due to its low gravity. The low-g environment would mean crops need less water and fertilizer than they do on Earth.
Future space farms in science fiction usually involve scenes of greenery thriving inside hydroponic systems, but as bio-geo researchers Federico Maggia and Céline Pallud note, this would be unnecessary since using old-fashioned soil has plenty of advantages.
Soil-based agriculture can use settlers’ waste for fertilizer; it can sequester carbon and produce oxygen; and it’s a reliable way to biologically filter water, for instance.
The problem is that Mars is not Earth, gravitationally speaking. Gravity affects the rate at which water and nutrients flow through soil, and plants have evolved to these constraints.
Martian gravity is about one-third as strong as Earth’s, meaning water would flow at a slower rate. This could lead to suffocation of microorganisms and roots, along with emissions of toxic gases, Maggia and Pallud write in a study published early online this week in Advances in Space Research.
To study this effect, Maggi, a University of Sydney biogeochemist, and Pallud, a biogeophysicist at UC-Berkeley, simulated both Mars- and Earth-gravity root processes using BIOTOUGHREACT, a model of soil nutrient transport and microbe dynamics developed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
As Wired Science notes, they realized slower water transport is a good thing. Soil under Martian gravity is able to hold more water, so less of it leaches through and is lost, the authors say.
This increased efficiency means you could use a whopping 90 percent less water for Martian irrigation than what you’d need on Earth. You could also use fewer fertilizers, the authors add.
On the flip side, Martian soil allows for faster consumption of oxygen and dissolved organic carbon, which resulted in a 10 percent increase in CO2 emissions.
So once we start terraforming Mars, our agriculture might be more efficient, but we’ll still have to worry about those blasted greenhouse gases.
Source: Popular Science.
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Well, according to me, yes we will do. Because of we really find a gardening and cultivating method without soil. And So we can do every thing regarding farming and gardening. And according to me, Hydroponics is really the great way to do the same thing. And the existing content and features are really looking just informative about it. And it really increases my amount of knowledge about it. Thanks for sharing some cool thing about farming and gardening.
we couldnt use the martian soil because in class we learned that the soil is toxic. So no you could not grow plants in the soil there