Galactic Realms | Sustaining Our Planet for Future Generations
Sustaining Our Planet for Future Generations
Sustaining our planet for future generations (Potato Planting in harsh conditions).
Summary
Because of increasing population and consequent increase in demand of land and various agricultural products, it is indeed necessary that we increase the area undercultivation multi-fold. At present, the area under cultivation is much lesser than the total available land. So, our project focusses on converting the harsh and extremeenvironment conditions and waste and isolated lands, such as desert areas etc., into sustainable ecosystems, and also on increasing the yield and productivity in existing ecosystems using minimum resources. For this, we have devised a way for Potato planting in extreme environments (taking inspiration from potato planting project on Mars).
How We Addressed This Challenge
An experiment conducted by researchers at the International Potato Center (CIP) to determine whether potatoes could be grown on Mars not only produced encouraging results for proposals to put people on the Red Planet, it also provided valuable information for CIP’s efforts to help farmers produce food on this planet’s marginal lands.
Carrying forward this idea, scientists at NASA and the International Potato Centre (CIP) in Lima, Peru, built a tuber-growing experiment, that recreates the extreme conditions as on our Earth.
Everything happens inside a box called a CubeSat. The CubeSat houses a container holding soil and the tuber. Inside this hermetically sealed environment the CubeSat delivers nutrient rich water, controls the temperature for harsh day and night conditions and mimics Mars air pressure, oxygen and carbon dioxide levels. Sensors constantly monitor these conditions and live streaming cameras record the soil in anticipation of the potato sprouting.
According to the data, in February 2017, researchers dumped practically lifeless soil from Peru's Pampas de la Joya desert inside a Cubesat, planted a tuber in it, sealed up the box, and began filming to see what happened.
"Preliminary results are positive," according to a CIP press release - which is to say a potato plant grew in inhospitable desert soil under extreme desert like conditions. Though it was arid and inhospitable, it probably still had microbes that may have helped the potato plant's growth.
In this Project, several rounds of experiments will be done to find out which potato varieties do best. We want to know what the minimum conditions are that a potato needs to survive
Future missions that hope to grow potatoes in extreme and harsh conditions will have to prepare soil with a loose structure and nutrients to allow the tubers to obtain enough air and water to allow it to tuberize.
We will use potato cuttings instead of seeds. That's an issue because making potatoes last on a months- or years-long journey may require heating under pressure (called thermostabilisation) or a blast of radiation.
This project holds great importance as it will help us to make the unsustainable lands sustainable, and also will increase the yield with minimum resources.
Also, All of this potato project and research will have both Earthly and space-based applications. We will breed potato clones that can tolerate high salt conditions or drought. These potato varieties will also allow small farmers to keep growing food, even in areas that are not prime agricultural land (or those that have been affected by climate change). Also, lessons learned from the experiments could be applied in Earthly agriculture settings to increase food security around the world.
So, this project is expected to meet our idea of making isolated and waste lands into cultivable lands and sustainable ecosystems, and also it will help us to better understand the extreme and harsh conditions in outer space.
How We Developed This Project
Joel Ranck, CIP Head of Communications, said: "How better to learn about climate change than by growing crops on a planet that died two billion years ago? We need people to understand that if we can grow potatoes in extreme conditions like those on Mars, we can save lives on Earth".
In the 2015 blockbuster movie “The Martian”, a fictional botanist-turned-astronaut gets stranded on Mars, forcing him to “Science the shit” out of his dire situation. He survives by fertilising Martian soil with his faeces, slicing up potatoes, and planting the cuttings in the soil. This eventually grows him enough food to last hundreds of days.
Growing potatoes and other food on Mars is not just a sci-fi curiosity. Now, a NASA’s experiment “Potato on Mars” is showing that the fictional feat shown in the movie might actually be possible.
This is from where we got the inspiration for our project.
The same idea can be used for potato plantation and cultivation in extreme conditions on Earth, such as in Atacama Desert (which has conditions very similar to Mars) etc., which is otherwise lifeless and isolated.
Also, taking inspiration from same idea, CIP researchers undertook an experiment in 2016 to see if potato could be grown in the harsh soil of Pampas de la Joya – a hyper-arid section of Peru’s coastal desert – that is considered the closest thing to Martian soil available on Earth.
This inspired us to think of an idea to convert unsustainable lands into sustainable environments, so as to meet the agricultural requirements of the ever increasing population.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
· According to the data, in February 2017, researchers dumped practically lifeless soil from Peru's Pampas de la Joya desert inside a Cubesat, planted a tuber in it, sealed up the box, and began filming to see what happened.
"Preliminary results are positive," according to a CIP press release - which is to say a potato plant grew in inhospitable desert soil under extreme desert like conditions.
· David Ramirez, a crop ecophysiologist at CIP, explains that he and his colleagues placed in-vitro plantlets of 65 different potato genotypes inside peat pellets, watered them for two weeks, and then transplanted them into pots filled with soil from la Joya, as well as pots filled with peat soil as a control. Those plantlets included five improved varieties, 22 native potato varieties and 38 advanced clones. Ramirez and colleagues report that 40 percent of those genotypes managed to grow in the la Joya soil and some of them produced small tubers, indicating a potential for producing potatoes in the dusty soil of Atacama and other deserts and harsh areas. However, Ramirez notes that potatoes would need to be grown inside an enclosure with controlled atmospheric pressure and temperature to survive in such extreme conditions.
· Growers using this advanced method can produce a new, virus-free crop of minitubers every 40 to 50 days instead of the previous yearly crop. One facility can now produce as many as 10 to 20 million minitubers per year -- a huge benefit to countries that, in the past, have been forced to depend almost entirely upon imported seed potatoes to meet their needs.
So, in this way we can also increase the yield and the productivity in the current cultivable fields.
· Also, by recording all this plantation data, and by carefully studying this data, we can devise more effective ways for cultivating the current waste lands (on Earth) as well as on other planets (such as Mars) and for increasing the crop yields.
Project Demo
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1IVESSQdUduISWylTDUCkcuckIccmkErW?usp=sharing
Data & Resources
1 :- https://www.sciencealert.com/growing-potatoes-on-mars-might-actually-work-hints-a-new-experiment
2 :- https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.space.com/amp/36015-potatoes-grow-mars-conditions-experiment.html
3 :- https://cipotato.org/blog/research-reveals-potential-growing-potatoes-mars/
4 :- https://youtu.be/n93mxKMchnY