Daniella McCahey, assistant professor of history, Texas Tech University writes that figuring out how to feed people in space is a major part of a larger effort to demonstrate the viability of long-term human habitation of extra-terrestrial environments. This is Part 1 of a two-part article.
In May 2022, a team of scientists announced that they had successfully grown plants using lunar soil gathered during the Apollo moon missions. But this is not the first time that scientists have attempted to grow plants in soils that typically do not support life.
As the author of this article, I am a historian of Antarctic science. How to grow plants and food in the far southern reaches of Earth has been an active area of research for more than 120 years. These efforts have helped further understanding of the many challenges of agriculture in extreme environments and eventually led to limited, but successful, plant cultivation in Antarctica. And especially after the 1960s, scientists began to explicitly look at this research as a stepping-stone to human habitation in space.
Growing plants in Antarctica
The earliest efforts to grow plants in Antarctica were primarily focused on providing nutrition to explorers.
In 1902, British physician and botanist Reginald Koettlitz was the first person to grow food in Antarctic soils. He collected some soil from McMurdo Sound and used it to grow mustard and cress in boxes under a skylight aboard the expedition’s ship. The crop was immediately beneficial to the expedition. Koettlitz produced enough that during an outbreak of scurvy, the entire crew ate the greens to help stave off their symptoms. This early experiment demonstrated that Antarctic soil could be productive, and also pointed to the nutritional advantages of fresh food during polar expeditions.
Early attempts to grow plants directly in Antarctic landscapes were less successful. In 1904, Scottish botanist Robert Rudmose-Brown mailed seeds from 22 cold-tolerant Arctic plants to the small, frigid Laurie Island to see if they would grow. All of the seeds failed to sprout, which Rudmose-Brown attributed to both the environmental conditions and the absence of a biologist to help usher their growth.
There have been many more attempts to introduce non-native plants to the Antarctic landscape, but generally they didn’t survive for long. While the soil itself could support some plant life, the harsh environment was not friendly to plant cultivation.
Modern techniques
By the 1940s, many nations had begun setting up long-term research stations in Antarctica. Since it was impossible to grow plants outside, some people living at these stations took it upon themselves to build greenhouses to provide both food and emotional well-being. But they soon realised that Antarctic soil was of too poor quality for most crops beyond mustard and cress, and it typically lost its fertility after a year or two.
Starting in the 1960s, people began switching to the soilless method of hydroponics, a system in which you grow plants with their roots immersed in chemically enhanced water under a combination of artificial and natural light. By using hydroponic techniques in greenhouses, plant production facilities weren’t using the Antarctic environment to grow crops at all. Instead, people were creating artificial conditions.
By 2015 there were at least 43 different facilities on Antarctica where researchers had grown plants at some time or another. While these facilities have been useful for scientific experiments, many Antarctic residents appreciated being able to eat fresh vegetables in the winter and considered these facilities enormous boons for their psychological well-being. As one researcher put it, they are “warm, bright and full of green life – an environment one misses during the Antarctic winter”.
Continued in Part 2…
Republished under creative commons licence from The Conversation Africa.
Want to read more on this topic? See this Cold Link Africa news post on space agriculture from 2022.