FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Tomatoes will one day grow on Mars, Guelph University professor declares,
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a tomato plant I’d discovered that was so tough “. . . it could grow on Mars.”
I was only joking, of course. But Dr. Mike Dixon isn’t joking. He insists that it’s going to happen one day.
“We WILL grow food like tomatoes in space — and ultimately on Mars,” he declares. “In fact, we’re already trying it. So are the Russians. They’re now growing wheat on MIR (their space station).”
And if anyone should know, it’s Dixon. He’s director of the University of Guelph’s Controlled Environmental Systems Research Facility — which is a fancy way of saying that he heads a team of scientists and techy types who spend their days holed up in a low, windowless building on the university campus, tinkering with the ins and outs of this (to me) impossible-sounding endeavour.
The research facility, dimly lit and dominated by massive black steel chambers with heavy, locked doors, is unique in Canada — and perhaps the world. And it made headlines a few years ago, when Dixon persuaded Canadian astronauts Chris Hadfield and Bob Thirsk to haul a sack of tomato seeds up to the International Space Station (ISS) “. . . to see what would happen to them.”
“The object wasn’t to grow tomatoes up there,” he explains.
“We simply wanted to know if being in space had any effect on the germination rate of the seeds.”
So, after the astronauts came home, their much-travelled carryon baggage (a dependable Roma variety of tomato, donated to the mission by Stokes Seeds in Niagara) was doled out in small quantities to 20,000 schools across Canada, for kids to experiment with.
“We called the project Tomatosphere. The kids loved getting involved. Anything with the word ‘space’ in it has a magic ring to them,” Dixon says.
“Those seeds got planted in science classes from coast to coast.”
And the result? Being weightless and subjected to cosmic radiation during 19 months of floating around in the space station made absolutely no difference to the seeds’ viability. Back on planet Earth, they germinated as if they’d never left.
“It was a small but significant step toward growing food in space,” Dixon concludes.
Since then, Canada’s extraterrestrial cultivation crew has unveiled some far more significant discoveries.
And with funding for space exploration dwindling everywhere, it’s good to learn that the research isn’t simply providing fodder for advocates of living in the heavens.
Experiments at Guelph are also proving hugely useful to earthbound “controlled environments” like greenhouses where, increasingly, our food comes from.
They’ve found, for instance, that light — the kind of light and how much — has a huge impact on how well plants grow.
When LED lights are used (instead of your typical fluorescent tube greenhouse setups) yields of crops such as cucumbers can jump dramatically.
And if you alter the temperature — as well as the composition of air — flowing into the plant’s growing environment, there are other startling changes.
The Americans yearned to hit lunar golf balls. But this made-in-Canada fantasy sounds like far more fun
“We can improve on Mother Nature,” Dixon says.
“Plants are incredible machines because they’re so adaptable. We can modify the chemistry of marijuana, for instance, so that it has many benefits in medicine.”
So will all this tinkering eventually result in humans actually going to live in space?
Dixon thinks so. To survive somewhere like Mars, he estimates that we would need an area of 60 to 80 square metres to produce “a nutritionally sound vegetarian diet.” Crops like tomatoes, lettuce, soy, sweet potatoes, wheat and barley could all be grown, using structures (probably inflatable), which have the same atmosphere as Earth.
“I particularly like the idea of barley. My personal dream, ” he grins broadly, “. . . is to build a distillery on the moon — and be the first to taste a wee dram up there.”
Oh boy. The Americans yearned to hit lunar golf balls. But this madein-Canada fantasy sounds like far more fun.
So good luck, Mike. If you ever make it, bring back a dram for me. soniaday.com