Implications of different plant cultivation techniques for food production in space based on experiments in EDEN ISS

• Main Authors: Zabel, Paul, Vrakking, Vincent, Zeidler, Conrad, Schubert, Daniel
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: 2020 International Conference on Environmental Systems 2020
• Subjects: Bio-regenerative life support; Food production; Harvest; Vegetable; Antarctica; Neumayer; Antarc*
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/2346/86359

Paul Zabel, German Aerospace Center (DLR), DE Vincent Vrakking, German Aerospace Center (DLR), DE Conrad Zeidler, German Aerospace Center (DLR), DE Daniel Schubert, German Aerospace Center (DLR), DE ICES204: Bioregenerative Life Support The proceedings for the 2020 International Conference on Environmental Systems were published from July 31, 2020. The technical papers were not presented in person due to the inability to hold the event as scheduled in Lisbon, Portugal because of the COVID-19 global pandemic. The EDEN ISS greenhouse is a space-analogue test facility near the German Neumayer III station in Antarctica. The facility is part of the project of the same name and was designed and built since 2015 and eventually deployed in Antarctica in January 2018. The first operational phase of the greenhouse started on February the 7th and continued until the 20th of November 2018. The purpose of the facility is to enable multidisciplinary research on topics related to future plant cultivation on human space exploration missions. Research on food quality and safety, plant health monitoring, microbiology, system validation, human factors and horticultural sciences was conducted. Part of the latter was an experiment to compare different plant cultivation techniques for lettuce and tomato plants. For lettuce two different harvest methods were applied, either batch harvesting of the fully grown lettuce heads or spread harvesting of mature leaves while leaving the plant alive to allow regrowth. The dwarf tomato plants were cultivated for three different durations. The short growth cycle ended right after the first set of fruits were harvested. The plants were then terminated and new plants sown. The longest duration cultivation involved several pruning events were old stems and leaves were removed from the plants allowing regrowth of new shoots. This paper compares the impact of the different cultivation techniques on the biomass output, the required crewtime and the required energy. The results show that ...