{"id":1024554,"date":"2024-05-01T16:30:09","date_gmt":"2024-05-01T23:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theaegisalliance.com\/?p=1024554"},"modified":"2026-09-01T08:12:43","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T15:12:43","slug":"future-farms-on-mars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theaegisalliance.com\/it\/2024\/05\/01\/future-fattorie-su-marte\/","title":{"rendered":"Tomatoes Doubled Their Harvest in Fake Martian Dirt While Peas and Carrots Lost \u2014 Wageningen’s First Intercropping Trial for the Red Planet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hauling potting soil nine months through space is a logistics joke, not a colony plan. If people are going to eat on Mars they have to grow food in the dirt that is already there \u2014 a toxic, organic-free powder NASA calls regolith. A Wageningen University greenhouse trial published in PLOS ONE on May 1, 2024<\/a> tested an old Earth trick against that powder: plant different crops in the same pot and see who helps whom.<\/p>\n

The paper, “Intercropping on Mars,” was led by astrobiologist Rebeca Gon\u00e7alves with co-authors Dr. Wieger Wamelink, Peter van der Putten, and Dr. Jochem Evers. They put cherry tomatoes, peas, and carrots into NASA’s MMS-1 Mars simulant, into sand, and into potting soil. Some pots were mixed. Some were monocrops. Rhizobia bacteria went in with the peas to fix nitrogen. The greenhouse air, heat, and humidity were tuned to what a pressurized Martian greenhouse would actually feel like. It is the first time that planting method has been scored on fake Red Planet dirt.<\/p>\n

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Experimental setup: Mars simulant, sand, and Earth soil, planted mixed or alone. (Wageningen University & Research \/ Rebeca Gon\u00e7alves)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Tomato Won. The Carrot Did Not.<\/h2>\n

Tomatoes were the surprise. Grown next to peas and carrots in the simulant, they roughly doubled the fruit of tomatoes grown alone \u2014 more berries, bigger berries, earlier flowers, thicker stems. Wamelink had bet on the peas. “We had expected the peas to grow the best but the opposite turned out to be true. The tomatoes grew the best,” he said. The working theory is that the peas, even struggling, leaked enough nitrogen for the tomato to steal.<\/p>\n

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Tomatoes over the simulant, with the root network underneath. (Wageningen University & Research \/ Rebeca Gon\u00e7alves)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The rest of the harvest is the part the press releases sanded off. In the Mars simulant, intercropping helped the tomato and hurt almost everyone else. Carrots put on less biomass. Peas barely moved. The system’s total relative yield came in at 0.93 \u2014 a net loss against monocropping. Rhizobia never formed the root nodules they need to fix nitrogen. The simulant’s high pH, compactness, and missing nutrients beat the bacteria. Tall tomato and pea plants then stole the light from the carrots. Wamelink’s line on that: the tomato profited from the peas, “the carrot most certainly did not.”<\/p>\n

Flip the substrate to sand and the math reverses. Nodulation worked. Intercropping beat monocropping, relative yield 1.32. That contrast is the actual finding: mix the crops only after you fix the dirt enough for the bacteria to live. Until then, the Maya technique that Smithsonian flagged as a Mars solution is a tomato subsidy paid for by the other two plants.<\/p>\n

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