Editorial: Food from space | Farmtario

The recent Canada-wide Rogers outage was a reminder for me of what life was like before the internet. 

Although it was a huge inconvenience (I wasn’t able to work at all that day), it was a trip down memory lane. It was nice to disconnect and not feel the need to check my email or get sucked into a social media hole or spend way too much time looking up information that I could live without. Most of us try to do this while on vacation or on the weekends, but it’s not always an easy thing to do, especially when we have become accustomed to having the information we want right at our fingertips.

I’m sure many children and teenagers, who have spent their entire lives connected, had difficulty with the concept that they couldn’t talk to their friends or play some of the games they like. Many parents likely heard “when is it (the internet) coming back on?” more times than they would have liked. 

Luckily my nine-year-old daughter was at camp for most of the day and is still young enough that playing with friends in-person or toys takes precedence over technology most of the time. But “TV” time before bed for her almost always involves streaming something, rather than watching what is available in real-time via cable, satellite, or an antenna.

My husband and I have joked with her before about how when we were kids if you had to get a snack or use the washroom, you had to make sure to do it during commercial breaks or you would miss your show. There was no pause button, and if you missed an episode, you couldn’t just play it again whenever you wanted. 

She has great difficulty with this concept, just like I had great difficulty at her age believing much of what I saw on TV or read about that said humans would be talking to one another on screens and have refrigerators that talked (like in the old cartoon The Jetsons) or living on a spaceship like in Star Trek: The Next Generation. 

While we don’t live in space yet or have cars that fly, much of the technology that was once science fiction is now reality. 

And it has been a boon for agriculture. 

A recent article by University of Guelph researchers in The Conversation aptly titled “Space agriculture boldly grows food where no one has grown before” investigates the connections between space exploration and technological advances in agriculture. 

The authors, Dr. Thomas Graham, the PhytoGro Research Chair in Controlled Environment Systems and PhD candidate Ajwal Dsouza of the department of environmental sciences, said “agriculture has been improved significantly through the application of space-based advances to terrestrial challenges” and “as access to space increases, the potential for terrestrial benefits directly tied to space exploration grow exponentially.” 

The greatest benefits are for mitigating climate change and food security, they said. 

They write that by far, the most realized benefit of space for farming has been the use of satellite monitoring. “Like mindful eyes in the sky” satellites such as NASA’s Landsat, the European Space Agency’s Envisat and the Canadian Space Agency’s RADARSAT have specialized sensors that can monitor things such as soil moisture, crop growth and weather patterns, which helps scientists predict crop yields, threats, and failures. 

Satellite technology drives the GPS and mapping tools that have helped farmers use less inputs and be more efficient. 

There has also been a growing interest in trying to grow food in space to not only provide nourishment for astronauts but to develop crops that have deeper root systems or can withstand stressors such as radiation. “Space is the ultimate ‘harsh environment’ for life to exist in,” they wrote. 

In the article, space biologist Anna-Lisa Paul describes plants as being able to “reach into their genetic toolbox and remake the tools they need” to adapt to the novel environment of space, which could be used to solve challenges facing crops in Earth’s changing climate.

The rapid advancement in vertical farming has been made possible because of NASA’s research in controlled environment systems to grow plants without soil.

At the age of nine, I couldn’t comprehend how technology would change our lives. I wonder what types of technological advancements my daughter will see between now and when she’s my age. 

Maybe by then we will be eating food grown in space and getting around in flying cars.