Growing Alfalfa in Martian-like Soil and Filtering Water using Bacteria and Martian Basalt

By Bob Yirka

A team of researchers at Iowa State University has found that it may be possible to grow alfalfa successfully on Mars. The group has written a paper describing their work and have published it on the open-access site PLOS ONE.

As various groups around the world ponder the possibility of not only sending humans to Mars but of building shelters on the Red Planet that could sustain them—possibly indefinitely—work continues on ways to make such projects possible. Such projects have many challenges to overcome before they can become reality, one of which is how to feed people living so far away. One possibility that is getting a lot of study is growing food inside of protected enclosures. Such enclosures would have to mimic conditions here on Earth, of course, since the plants that would be grown there would have to come from here.

Growing plants on Mars will require a few basic elements—soil, water, food and sunlight. In this new effort, the researchers looked at the first two. Mars does not have much to offer in the way of soil, instead it has basalt, a kind of volcanic rock. Basalt has few if any of the ingredients in it that plants could use as food, and it is rocky rather than loamy. Thus, growing food in it would require both altering the basalt and using plants best suited to it use.