Space exploration can drive the next agricultural revolution

Header image: The future of agriculture? Nick Dragotta

Nikolaus Correll, University of Colorado Boulder

Habitation of outer space needs solving air, water, energy and food supplies within a tight space. And this isn’t a problem of an apocalyptic, remote future. Developing this technology addresses some of the grand challenges to our civilisation. Space exploration can be one of the main drivers to revolutionise sustainable agriculture on Earth for many reasons.

First, so far agriculture has not been a driver of innovation in automation, but a beneficent of it. That needs to change. The current economy promotes increasing the size of farm equipment and producing a single crop for many years, which are techniques better suited to automation. Advances in robotics can decrease the detrimental effects of farming by improving resource management and inter-cropping (that is changing the type of crop produced). Small-scale robotic platforms can provide each plant with the required resources as it needs them. This can help agriculture reclaim urban environments, such as inside buildings or on roofs.

Addressing the challenge of making urban environments greener is similar to the challenges of solving food production on a spaceship or in a Mars colony. Solutions will not come from incremental changes to the current system, but require a disruptive approach – such as the use of robots.

Second, sustainable agriculture is a systems challenge that requires advances in renewable energy and integration of resource management, especially in urban environments or those of a spaceship.

Going to Mars is a “rucksack problem”. Explorers have to decide on a combination of provisions and tools that allow them to maximise exploration and minimise