Growing crops on the Moon

Question

The short version of my question is this:

It's some time in the future. I go into my back garden and focus my telescope on the Moon. The surface is virtually covered with giant greenhouses, growing food to support the cities that have sprung up there. The question is: what plants are they growing in those greenhouses?

Factors such as temperature, water, soil quality etc. can be controlled easily enough if you already have the ability to build sealed greenhouses in a vacuum. There are also a number of experiments on growing food in closed systems where air and water are recycled (the Biosphere 2 project being the best known). The low gravity can't be controlled, but there have been a number of experiments on plant growth in microgravity conducted on the international space station, so growing plants in Lunar gravity should be possible. There have also been some interesting results from growing plants in an Earth-based approximation to Lunar soil.

However, another important issue is the length of the Lunar day, which is 28 Earth days long, meaning that the Sun shines continuously for two Earth weeks, followed by two weeks of total darkness. I'm interested in what's known about how plants could adapt to this, but I haven't been able to find any research papers on the subject. Of course it would be possible to simulate an Earth day using artificial lighting, but the energy costs of doing this on a large scale would be rather high, so for economic reasons future Lunar farmers would likely want to keep it to a minimum.

So my first question is, has any research been done on the effect of extreme changes in day length on plant growth?

Secondly, is there any type of food plant that would be particularly likely to cope with such an environment (perhaps with some suitable genetic modifications)? For example, would normal crop plants such as cereals be able to build up enough sugar reserves in two weeks to survive the next two weeks in total darkness? If not, is there another type of plant that's more likely to be able to adapt to this? Or as an alternative strategy, is there any crop that grows fast enough that its shoots could be harvested after only two weeks of continuous sunlight? (Some individuals would have to be grown to maturity under artificial light in order to produce seeds, of course.)

Finally, I'd be grateful for pointers towards research on any other issues that I might have missed that are relevant to the problem of large-scale Lunar agriculture.

Answer 1

Plants are adapted to the conditions we have here on earth, therefore, for them to grow on the moon we would have to recreate the conditions found on earth (or at least find conditions that we can create and they can grow in). To do this we would need to replicate climate (temperature, air pressure, humidty etc.), provide (sun)light at the necessary intervals and intensity, provide water, air, and nutrients of the right composition, intervals and intensity. That is a simplified version...

In reality there is great variation in how plants require these things. Some cope with long dark periods better than others, some cope with drought better than others, some cope with chemical variation in the soil better than others so answering this question is hard. But generally growing plants on the moon will require the ability to recreate (to some degree depending on the sensitivity of the plant) the conditions a plant has evolved under on earth.

Thus to answer your questions:

Length of day can have strong effects on growth patterns, two weeks of darkness is likely to be a major upset for plants! Just transplanting plants of the same species from different latitudes can affect the growth patterns because of changes in length of day. Try putting some plants in darkness for two weeks and see what happens.

Plants all vary in their ability to meet the requirements of space growth. There will only be a short list of plants that could with "small" modifications to the moon's environment, the more we adapt (adding artificial light, watering, adding nutrients etc) the longer that list would become - the limitation is in our ability to adapt the moon.

See above for reasons why plants might struggle. Oh and we would need to consider the effects of reduced gravity too...

Here's a little something from nasa about how plants are used in space vehicles. And another on light and gravity.