Turns out growing crops on the Red Planet is a lot like growing food on a climate-ravaged Earth.
ArticleBody:This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here. The first thing Brazilian astrobiologist Rebeca Gonçalves remembers learning as a child was the order of the planets. Her uncle, an astrophysicist, also taught her all about the constellations dotting the night skies over Sao Paulo. “Ever since I was little, I have been in love with space,” she said. That led to a career in space agriculture, figuring out how to grow food on other planets.
Past studies have shown that, on average, intercropping with two crops needed 19 percent less land than each individual crop grown in isolation. “Take a village in Africa that is suffering with degraded soils, and the farmers are suffering, the community is suffering. If we can have the setup that we have created for a Martian colony, it’s really no different than a small African village, because we could have the same technology there,” said Gonçalves.
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