Missoula’s Galactic Farms an Integral Component of the Mars City Design 2016

Jeff did an interview with Bill Hargenrader for his webseries Mars Now. They talked a little bit about the Zero-G hydro-organic system we were running and how this method could be used for farming in space. Bill really liked our idea and suggested that we join his team for the Mars City Design competition.

For our submission, we described how Galactic Farms http://galacticfarms.com has been creating a hydroponic fertilizer using recycled materials like food scraps and lumber byproduct. Recycling nutrients like this is important for any closed loop system, whether that be a remote city in the Rocky Mountains or a settlement on Mars. The process is easy for us in our city because there are already a lot of biologically fixed materials around to extract nutrients from. Mars, in contrast, has plenty of raw minerals but they are not necessarily available to plant roots. To translate what we were doing to a Martian setting, we needed to do more research on Martian conditions and what has been proposed in the scientific literature so far.

by Jeff Pernell

Full Story: http://galacticfarms.com/mars-city-design-2016/