Guest:  Marshall Martin:  Topics: Space farming, food in space, artificial gravity, nutrition, needed scientific experiments, ISS as a model.

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We welcomed back to the show Marshall Martin who is in his professional life, a farmer in Oklahoma. Marshall has an interest in space farming and growing food in space for space settlements so he was with us to share his farming expertise, research and suggestions with us on how food might be grown in space, what space farms may look like and what was needed here on Earth to make it all happen.

During our 1 hour 36 minute discussion, Marshall presented information from a spreadsheet he made which I copied and posted to the blog for this show. I suggest you refer tohis spreadsheet during our discussion. In addition, we had multiple email questions and interesting phone calls.  As I have done before, I am repeating the tags/key words below as they do a good job in summarizing our the major points of what Marshall had to say.

Tags/Key Words: "Marshall Martin, space farming, food for space settlements, biosphere, wheat as a space crop, ISS experience, Stanford Toros, children in space, diets for adults and children in space, in space nutrition R&D, domestic farming compared to space farming, synthetic food, SpaceX food plans, Starship, Mars volcanic ash beds for good soil, hydroponics, artificial gravity, spin rates, life support experiments, mining, AI, mining robots, suggested timelines." 

In addition, Marshall spent time discussing Starship and Elon Musk, acre feet needed for crop production, plus the figure of one acre feeding about 2.43 people.  Fremont John called Marshall to talk about biologically self sufficient settlements, the use of artificial gravity, and the need to determine the gravity prescription. Marshall was in agreement wit the caller.  It was said that the solution to many of these problems was the rotating structure to produce artificial gravity.  They both talked about the big leap a Martian settlement would be so don't miss that part of their discussion.  Later when talking more about Mars, Marshall suggested volcanic ash beds would provide good soil for farming and crop growing on Mars.  A bit earlier in the conversation, Ft. Worth John called to talk about the classic book, "Farmer In The Sky' by Robert Heinlein. 

Please post your comments/questions for Marshall on our blog for this show.  You can reach Marshall through me.