Agriculture on Mars

[farmerben]

Very interesting discussions lately in a couple of other threads about how to operate an agricultural system on Mars.  One question that interests me is how complex the ecosystems need to be?  Do you need soil microbes, fungi, and even insects?  If so how diverse do you really want to be?  

I've done a great deal farming the old fashioned way and the biggest problem is competing with weeds and insects.  I like the idea of being able to sterilize and restart your growing environment by just "spacing" it (removing the air for a while).

Some food plants can definitely be grown in a sterile environment.  But I would argue better food will be produced with compost and soil microorganisms.  This can be done with very modest effort.  Suppose we sterilize a 100m2 dome by "spacing" it.  Then I think we could restart a active soil ecosystem with a few gallons of compost tea.

If you are talking about more complex agriculture, you would feed all of your plant residues to animals like rabbits and chickens.  That would bring with it a system that you cannot easily sterilize and restart.  Eventually you will have problems with invasive species.  The more insects and complex life you bring the more the invasive species problem will become manifest.

It makes sense to me to have a network of semi-independent domes and to move products between them as desired.  With some of the domes being periodically sterilized on purpose just to make the cultivation of annual plants easier.

[darthgently]

3 hours ago, farmerben said:

Very interesting discussions lately in a couple of other threads about how to operate an agricultural system on Mars.  One question that interests me is how complex the ecosystems need to be?  Do you need soil microbes, fungi, and even insects?  If so how diverse do you really want to be?  

I've done a great deal farming the old fashioned way and the biggest problem is competing with weeds and insects.  I like the idea of being able to sterilize and restart your growing environment by just "spacing" it (removing the air for a while).

Some food plants can definitely be grown in a sterile environment.  But I would argue better food will be produced with compost and soil microorganisms.  This can be done with very modest effort.  Suppose we sterilize a 100m2 dome by "spacing" it.  Then I think we could restart a active soil ecosystem with a few gallons of compost tea.

If you are talking about more complex agriculture, you would feed all of your plant residues to animals like rabbits and chickens.  That would bring with it a system that you cannot easily sterilize and restart.  Eventually you will have problems with invasive species.  The more insects and complex life you bring the more the invasive species problem will become manifest.

It makes sense to me to have a network of semi-independent domes and to move products between them as desired.  With some of the domes being periodically sterilized on purpose just to make the cultivation of annual plants easier.

I really like the vacuum reset.  One could rotate through domes that are staggered in what stage they are in: Stages:

Start with a reset

Introduce the latest compost tea formulation

Monitor for invasive microbes, reset as required

Introduce insects and worms etc

Monitor for invasive species, disease, reset to step 1 as required

Plant crops from individual plant starts grown in previous good soil

…

Birds separate from crops with forage moved from plant domes as required.

Could also explore robotic picking of specific species of insects in ag domes to feed birds to modulate population of bugs and remove invasive bugs.  Bot would probably look a lot like a chicken really.

Invasive plants could be dealt with by robotic id and lasering as has already been developed.

 Ways to avoid full resets would be explored over time

Edited Wednesday at 01:22 PM by darthgently

[darthgently]

The image of tiny augmented reality glasses that only allow chickens to see the bugs you want the chickens to eat just popped in my head, lol

[farmerben]

Chickens who are not starving will completely ignore house flies and ants.  I've watched enough to be sure.  They must be unpalatable or something.  They will eat the hell out of grasshoppers, but why you would introduce or keep these three insect species sounds like a bad idea to me.  

I imagine livestock could be moved through airlocks and occasionally decontaminated just like the humans.  Most of the domes would be insect free most of the time.  Pollinating bees would be handled like other livestock.  It would be a priority to have parasite free bees.  As near as I can tell bees are not symbiotic to any other insects.  

Another question though is if you value insects and other lifeforms for their own sake, even when they produce no value and consume resources.  I would say no for most insects on Mars.

Invasive plants might be zero problem at all if things are done properly.  Invasive bacteria are inevitable, but spacing the bacteria could handle many potential problems.

[darthgently]

42 minutes ago, farmerben said:

Chickens who are not starving will completely ignore house flies and ants.  I've watched enough to be sure.  They must be unpalatable or something.  They will eat the hell out of grasshoppers, but why you would introduce or keep these three insect species sounds like a bad idea to me.  

I imagine livestock could be moved through airlocks and occasionally decontaminated just like the humans.  Most of the domes would be insect free most of the time.  Pollinating bees would be handled like other livestock.  It would be a priority to have parasite free bees.  As near as I can tell bees are not symbiotic to any other insects.  

Another question though is if you value insects and other lifeforms for their own sake, even when they produce no value and consume resources.  I would say no for most insects on Mars.

Invasive plants might be zero problem at all if things are done properly.  Invasive bacteria are inevitable, but spacing the bacteria could handle many potential problems.

You bring up many points.  Ultimately I don’t think we can achieve full knowledgeable control of a lot of these things, especially at the bacterial and viral level.  It’s simply too much information and too much ignorance.  Then, as if that isn’t enough, at the microbe scale adaptation happens rapidly enough that the required knowledge is always changing.   I’d like to think this is where AI and a zillion sensors helps out; very fast factor analysis and recognition of evolving patterns in how the microbes are doing things and intelligent recommended interventions.

But realistically, I think the time-staggered, staged, redundant isolated biospheres is the best failsafe against cascade failure as dramatized on Ganymede in The Expanse.  Your idea of vacuum resets of “fallow” zones is a good one.  But we know the tardigrades will laugh at that.  Can bacteria or viruses stowaway protected in a tardigrade?  I’m guessing so, but idk.

 Ultimately it will be useful real time response to an emerging novel state (never seen before) that will matter most.  I don’t see how that happens without AI seeing patterns far faster than we can.  But I write that optimistically, not fatalistically

 

Edited Wednesday at 02:33 PM by darthgently

[darthgently]

46 minutes ago, farmerben said:

Chickens who are not starving will completely ignore house flies and ants.

I did not know this.  Ants have a bunch of formic acid, they stink of it.  Maybe too sour or upset their stomachs; idk.  I always thought of chickens as the pigs of birds and stand corrected.

Insect eating spiders?  Do chickens eat spiders?  Probably depends on the type of spider.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

I'm fairly certain that a healthy food crop system is going to need to have a vibrant topsoil ecology. 

 

Sterility is highly overrated. 

 

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20151118-can-you-be-too-clean

 

[darthgently]

31 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I'm fairly certain that a healthy food crop system is going to need to have a vibrant topsoil ecology. 

 

Sterility is highly overrated. 

 

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20151118-can-you-be-too-clean

 

Yep.  I only leaned on the soil topic because there are some no-soil approaches that are quite popular, like hydroponics.  This will likely be useful in smaller transfer vessels if they don’t just go with space MREs and CO2 scrubbers etc.  Hydroponics can mimic a lot of the chemical and biological pathways that we know of but there is so much we don’t know that are just built in to rich soil that can have cascading effects via diet for generations of ag consumers.

Any real settlement is going to have soil with all its wonderful baggage and treasures.  

[Nuke]

7 hours ago, farmerben said:

Chickens who are not starving will completely ignore house flies and ants.  I've watched enough to be sure.  They must be unpalatable or something.  They will eat the hell out of grasshoppers, but why you would introduce or keep these three insect species sounds like a bad idea to me.  

I imagine livestock could be moved through airlocks and occasionally decontaminated just like the humans.  Most of the domes would be insect free most of the time.  Pollinating bees would be handled like other livestock.  It would be a priority to have parasite free bees.  As near as I can tell bees are not symbiotic to any other insects.  

Another question though is if you value insects and other lifeforms for their own sake, even when they produce no value and consume resources.  I would say no for most insects on Mars.

Invasive plants might be zero problem at all if things are done properly.  Invasive bacteria are inevitable, but spacing the bacteria could handle many potential problems.

at large enough scale i think it would be inevitable that some seed and critters sourced from earth would be contaminated with something you dont want in your domes. early on it would be highly controlled factory crops. but as the seed import grows so does the chance of contamination with something you dont want. some diversity is probibly good in the long term even though it would still be an engineered food chain which may or may not reveal all the serious problems right away. natural systems are extremely complex and we dont know what species we will survive without in the long term.

you might import animals like cats to keep the undesired pests at bay but which can eat the grain crops with a little modification in times when pests are scarce. though this may be my own bias for wanting to bring cats to the greater universe.

Edited Wednesday at 09:45 PM by Nuke

[Nuke]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I'm fairly certain that a healthy food crop system is going to need to have a vibrant topsoil ecology. 

 

Sterility is highly overrated. 

 

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20151118-can-you-be-too-clean

 

all the kids in school who had allergies also had clean freak helicopter parents. coincidence, i think not.

[StrandedonEarth]

37 minutes ago, Nuke said:

all the kids in school who had allergies also had clean freak helicopter parents. coincidence, i think not.

As our doctor said when our kids had a string of minor illnesses, “let them eat dirt!”

[darthgently]

I forgot something I meant to end with above.  Not only will stowaway organisms end up in our domes.  If evolution is real, and it is, novel microorganisms will arise in a settlement spanning millennia, or perhaps more quickly.  At least at the microbe level for sure.  One really can’t plan for that, only plan to adapt.  It must be happening on Earth right now, so would logically happen elsewhere also.  How fast is it happening on Earth right now on the microbe level?  If someone gave me a number I’d honestly think they were making it up mostly.  We are so in the dark.  We only discovered a decade or so back that there are bacteria that consume petroleum from seeps on the ocean floor.  How long have they been around?  A million years?  500 years?  Nearly any answer is plausible.

Finally, we often think of terraforming as entirely an engineering operation.  But I think that the evidence is strong that there exist on earth some small subset of microbes that could get a foothold in some tiny context on Mars and adaptation could roll onward from there.  If the microbes release oxygen, and we were patient enough, like a billion years, then most of the heavy lifting could be done by the tiniest earthlings, not us.  We speed it along, hopefully immensely so, by nurturing it, removing obstacles, some isolated exploratory gene editing here and there, introducing higher level species, providing shelter and energy, closing loops, increasing available habitable range etc.  But mostly just letting it grow and adapt.  So more like farmers, ranchers, wildlife conservationists, and cultivators with a huge amount of megastructure engineering thrown in.  

[Nuke]

i like to think that microbes can evolve in human perceptible time frames, though its more like observing evolutionary baby steps than the full scope of evolutionary iteration. household pests can actually evolve on you, wipe out 99% with your poison of choice, the 1% that survive will then be resistant to it. exterminators (at least the good ones) rotate their poisons for that reason. though a fair number of them dont in order to get repeat business. whenever my cats get fleas i always pick a different formulation than the one i used last time and it usually wipes them out for good in as little as 2 applications.

[StrandedonEarth]

52 minutes ago, darthgently said:

Finally, we often think of terraforming as entirely an engineering operation.  

Have you read Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Red/Green/Blue Mars” trilogy? It lays out a reasonable plan for terraforming, assuming a healthy space economy 

[darthgently]

2 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

Have you read Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Red/Green/Blue Mars” trilogy? It lays out a reasonable plan for terraforming, assuming a healthy space economy 

On my list, but way down there given various reviews I’d read.  Is the story telling good enough to justify that many books to tell it?  Maybe I’ll give it another look

[StrandedonEarth]

30 minutes ago, darthgently said:

On my list, but way down there given various reviews I’d read.  Is the story telling good enough to justify that many books to tell it?  Maybe I’ll give it another look

I enjoyed it although it was heavy on  the sociopolitical aspects, which is not my cup of tea. But I didn't feel like I was slogging through it. That said, I haven't re-read it as much as I do other books

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

3 hours ago, Nuke said:

microbes can evolve in human perceptible time

Absolutely. 

 

Covid has already changed.  It's currently not as aggressive. 

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250113-why-covid-19-is-becoming-less-deadly

[darthgently]

35 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Absolutely. 

 

Covid has already changed.  It's currently not as aggressive. 

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250113-why-covid-19-is-becoming-less-deadly

Oh yeah, I know about adaptations like that, I meant true speciation would take longer.  But I’m not really sure if the line between speciation and adaptation doesn’t get very blurred for those real tiny critters

[monophonic]

16 hours ago, darthgently said:

But realistically, I think the time-staggered, staged, redundant isolated biospheres is the best failsafe against cascade failure as dramatized on Ganymede in The Expanse.  Your idea of vacuum resets of “fallow” zones is a good one.  But we know the tardigrades will laugh at that.  Can bacteria or viruses stowaway protected in a tardigrade?  I’m guessing so, but idk.

We have discovered cultures of bacteria living on the outside of the ISS. In the friggin outside of the ISS, in the vacuum of space. They don't need tardigrades to protect them. They will laugh at the tenuous CO₂ atmosphere of Mars. Who knows how many perfect "vacuum" "resets" you can get before something like that exists in your dome? I bet not that many.

3 hours ago, darthgently said:

Oh yeah, I know about adaptations like that, I meant true speciation would take longer.  But I’m not really sure if the line between speciation and adaptation doesn’t get very blurred for those real tiny critters

This might be the same thing you are saying, but let me elaborate anyway. I don't know if it is even possible to draw a meaningful line between adaptation and speciation on asexually reproducing organisms at all. Isn't the standard line between species at whether the individuals can produce offspring that can themselves reproduce? You can't apply that test when the reproduction involves only a single individual.

[darthgently]

Just now, monophonic said:

We have discovered cultures of bacteria living on the outside of the ISS. In the friggin outside of the ISS, in the vacuum of space. They don't need tardigrades to protect them. They will laugh at the tenuous CO₂ atmosphere of Mars. Who knows how many perfect "vacuum" "resets" you can get before something like that exists in your dome? I bet not that many.

This might be the same thing you are saying, but let me elaborate anyway. I don't know if it is even possible to draw a meaningful line between adaptation and speciation on asexually reproducing organisms at all. Isn't the standard line between species at whether the individuals can produce offspring that can themselves reproduce? You can't apply that test when the reproduction involves only a single individual.

That is mostly what I was saying but I wasn’t as certain of the sex aspect of species definition for asexual life and assumed there must be some other criteria, or it was simply blurred to irrelevance

[farmerben]

2 hours ago, monophonic said:

 Who knows how many perfect "vacuum" "resets" you can get before something like that exists in your dome? I bet not that many.

 

Maybe the vacuum resets are not perfect and bacteria survive in the soil.  The resets will be able to control invasive plants and insects should you ever have a problem.

The opposite approach is the one I take.  Utilize maximum bacterial diversity to consume any malignant organisms.  In the early 20th century a soil scientist named Ehrenfried Pfeiffer collected compost and soil samples from farms and compost piles around the world, and eventually added all the samples to his own compost.  His collection lives on, biodynamic farmers use it.  

[farmerben]

5 hours ago, monophonic said:

Isn't the standard line between species at whether the individuals can produce offspring that can themselves reproduce? You can't apply that test when the reproduction involves only a single individual.

The whole concept of species is a man-made distinction.  Sort of like the rules of English grammar, they work most of the time except for the exceptions.

Most people have heard of lion-tiger hybrids.  According to Wikipedia a female liger reproduced with a lion producing a liliger which was feeble but survived.

Sheep and goat are not only different species, they are different genera.  Crosses are usually stillborn or infertile, but not always.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep–goat_hybrid

 

[darthgently]

1 hour ago, farmerben said:

The whole concept of species is a man-made distinction.  Sort of like the rules of English grammar, they work most of the time except for the exceptions.

Most people have heard of lion-tiger hybrids.  According to Wikipedia a female liger reproduced with a lion producing a liliger which was feeble but survived.

Sheep and goat are not only different species, they are different genera.  Crosses are usually stillborn or infertile, but not always.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep–goat_hybrid

 

It’s the age old “noun” problem in philosophy.  Defining the boundaries of a thing of some sort is a form of lossy data compression that makes talking about reality possible, yet kludgy.

[SunlitZelkova]

On 1/15/2025 at 1:58 PM, Nuke said:

all the kids in school who had allergies also had clean freak helicopter parents. coincidence, i think not.

I second this. During 6th grade camp I sat at the teacher’s table due to my allergies, and overheard my science teacher (who happened to be sitting next to me) talking to another teacher about how one hypothesis at the time (2014) of why allergies develop revolved around the parents being too clean.

Notably my biological grandmother has numerous allergies but my mother does not, and my mother and father were not clean-obsessed. Not sure how grandma was raised.

On 1/15/2025 at 2:52 PM, darthgently said:

 

I forgot something I meant to end with above.  Not only will stowaway organisms end up in our domes.  If evolution is real, and it is, novel microorganisms will arise in a settlement spanning millennia, or perhaps more quickly.  At least at the microbe level for sure.  One really can’t plan for that, only plan to adapt.  It must be happening on Earth right now, so would logically happen elsewhere also.  How fast is it happening on Earth right now on the microbe level?  If someone gave me a number I’d honestly think they were making it up mostly.  We are so in the dark.  We only discovered a decade or so back that there are bacteria that consume petroleum from seeps on the ocean floor.  How long have they been around?  A million years?  500 years?  Nearly any answer is plausible.

 

I think it is a given that if life becomes self-sustaining on Mars and doesn’t have much contact with Earth, it will diverge and become completely different from what is found on Earth. Same goes for humans.

Think humans in Europe vs. humans in Africa. And for other animals, the difference between African big cats vs. mountain lions in North America.

[farmerben]

The process of adaptation and evolution can happen much faster than most people realize.  Most domestic dog varieties are thought to be less than 500 years old.  Similarly most domestic food plants are shaped by human hands to the point of being unrecognizable from their wild cousins.  

We now have a biotech revolution which basically allows us to cross genes between organisms that cannot mate, and to delete genes.

If or when we find a bacteria that survives on Mars it will be an important discovery.  Somebody could use it as the basis for other engineered lifeforms to produce oxygen, etc.