Inorganic Farming

Through a series of events that aren’t important, I wound up going white water rafting with a bunch of physicists, biologists, and engineers who are summer interns with NASA.  Many of these people hope to be hurled into space in the future.  Based on my assessment of their sheer brilliance, I think they are excellent candidates.

One of the NASA group’s summer projects is to figure out how to grow plants in lunar soil.  As I learned yesterday, this presents spectacular challenges.  Unlike earth’s soil, which is produced by wind and rain gradually eroding rock, and all sorts of things decomposing slowly over time, lunar soil is produced through “bombardment.”  Essentially, it is tiny rock fragments created by massive celestial objects crashing into the moon with terrific force.  It turns out that all these little bits of rock are ferociously sharp, and contain elements that make farming a prodigious challenge.

To solve this problem, our friends at NASA are busy pouring money into unimaginably complex schemes to actually grow stuff up there.  (I am actually quite glad they are spending money on that sort of thing.  For my take on why, ask me sometime!) For example, one kid said that they might use these bacteria that create a highly acidic environment, on the order of Ph 1, to help break down the dust into better bits.  Then, you apply a second layer of bacteria that ingest some of the elements in the soil and secrete carbon and nitrogen to act like fertilizer. Once all this is complete, you can plant a heavily genetically engineered plant in the “soil.”  Hooray!

All of this got me thinking:  such a proposal is the polar opposite of organic farming.  Lunar farming would make a mockery of all of the central tenets of the organic food movement.

1. Locally Grown. I think it is pretty hard to get less locally grown than food grown on the MOON!  People complain about the fossil fuels used to truck potatoes from Idaho.  Just wait until rich people start trying to impress other rich people by serving lunar potatoes at parties.
2. Not Genetically Modified. Absolutely everything in this equation is going to be genetically modified.  The plants will be modified to grown in harsh soil and the bacteria will be modified to secrete the right stuff.  (I hope that for some time to come we will lack the ability to genetically modify the astronauts to be able to eat otherwise inedible things.)
3. Made by Small Farmers. I think the United States Government is the largest institution of any kind at all.  Comparatively, it makes Monsanto look like a mom and pop operation.
4. Fertilizer Free. No way. To make matters worse, the lunar fertilizer will be secreted by genetically modified organisms.
5. Sustainable. It takes an embarrassingly large chunk of the output of the world’s largest economy to grow stuff on the  moon.  We probably  can’t keep doing that forever.