Melbourne based university, La Trobe, is collaborating with crop cultivation solutions organisation, Gaia Project Australia, to develop a farming system that can thrive in a controlled and contained environment – even the depths of space.
La Trobe University and Gaia Project Australia have been named finalists in NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge, for a project designed to grow food for long space journeys such as the Artemis missions to the moon and Mars.
The team created a vertical farm where leafy and micro greens are grown in a controlled environment in 28 days, instead of the three months it would normally take in soil. In just 2 cubic metres, the system can grow 14–16kg of leafy greens a month, using less water and power than other systems. Unlike other systems, the plants grow in modules that automatically expand as the plants grow, giving larger plants the room they need reach full size.
La Trobe engineering lecturer, Dr Alex Stumpf, said that the project was the only finalist in Australia and was competing with several international and US projects.
“Our team spent many long days and nights creating the world’s first expandable grow channel vertical farm system,” said Stumpf.
“We are extremely proud of the unit, and we are excited to see what the judges think of our system. I believe we will do well in the competition, but regardless of the outcome, the system and the ideas will lead to real impact back here on Earth.”
The project was created by experts from La Trobe’s engineering and plant sciences departments, and the team at Gaia Project Australia, with commercial trials beginning in Australia, Qatar and India this year. It took six months to design and build a prototype that NASA could take to space to help feed astronauts.
The team, called Enigma of the Cosmos, will travel to Ohio in the US for the final on 15 and 16 August, where the winners will be chosen by NASA.
Although the project has been designed with space travel in mind, to offer astronauts a varied and healthy diet, the vertical farm also has significant potential on Earth.
With growing populations, people living in high density city apartments, the depletion of soils and unpredictable weather patterns, using vertical farms could be the future for large-scale food production and domestic growing.
Gaia Project Australia founder and CEO, Nadun Hennayaka, said that while the project goal was to create a growing environment optimised for space, it will have a real impact on the future of farming.
“In conventional farming, space is required between plants for people and machinery to operate, resulting in about 15 heads of lettuce per square metre. While robotic greenhouse setups can increase this to 25 to 40 heads per square metre, they come with high initial costs,” said Hennayaka.
“Our system, on the other hand, maximises space efficiency without relying on complex robotic systems, allowing us to grow 50 to 55 plants per square metre at a third of the cost.”
“Growing food without soil, with exactly the right nutrients, leads to less crop waste and eliminates the threats of pests, disease and adverse weather conditions damaging the crops."
The research is currently being used to develop better varieties and growth conditions for use in vertical farms by plant technologists at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Plants for Space, a research centre announced in 2022 and led by the University of Adelaide. The initiative was backed by $90 million in funding from the Australian government and supporting partners, and will help develop innovations for Earth through research for space.
