Martian Environment Is Ideally Suited For Crop Farming, Study Says

But I thought plants used CO2 and produced O2..where is the CO2 coming from?

Good news for future setlers of mars! But wouldn't CO2 and other greenhouse gases be something we want? I.E. greenhouse effect = warmer planet. (From a terraforming point of view.)

did the author take highschool biology?
"On the flip side, Martian soil allows for faster consumption of oxygen and dissolved organic carbon, which resulted in a 10 percent increase in CO2 emissions."
someone explain this to me...plants consume oxygen now?

Plants do consume oxygen, at least at night when they metabolize stored sugar instead of photosynthesizing. But they seem to be talking about the soil itself, or possibly organisms in the soil.

It doesn't seem so :P. Likely an accident though, but I'm not suprised. Greenhouse gasses though are a GOOD thing in this case, so long as they slow down emissions when they finally get it earth-like (assuming that is possible). After thousands of years though, at least.

Plants DO consume oxygen: during the night. They use oxygen to keep themselves alive until the sun comes back up.

Looks like some smarty pants messed up logic, since plants use CO2. Plus, mars needs those "Pesky" "greenhouse gases", that would at least help it develop an atmosphere. Unfortunately humans aren't very good at doing that... at all. Even so, i would love to be a mars farmer, sign me up.

Somebody forgot the fact of the temps of the surface of mars? To keep the plants off freezing, we have to develop some kind of greenhouse on steroids, maybe, using pure CO2 and pressurizing this greenhose. Furthermore, a greenhouse will need some kind of radiation shield.
I think íf we want to go to mars, we have to have first a greenhouse (or several ones) in order to create a sustentable habitat. This chore has to be made it by robots.

I say build a large solar or small nuclear power facility to flash boil gases out of the martian soil. Somehow we also need to generate large magnetic fields to protect us from radiation... I don't know much about that but I'm sure there is a solution. It's nice to know farming won't be made even more difficult on Mars. It's not like the idea isn't hard enough already.

After careful consideration of the incredibly harsh environment, the radiation, the inevitably nauseating potential to never want to see the color red again, I have come to the inevitable conclusion: I'm ready, send me. I'm a decent plant grower, can keep myself entertained easily, and am fairly adept at problem solving. I'll need a launch-transit-landing vehicle, and habitat. Go!

Unless agriculture increases the rate of atmospheric sequestration (rocks "inhale") and the authour decided to leave out what the hell they're talking about, it really seems Popular Science rolls out the B-team for online articles.

Wow, so pretty much the only thing to be gotten out of this whole article is that water moves through Martian soil slower due to reduced gravity. Surprise!
At least when we start to try and terraform Mars and realize the we dont have the technology to change the average temperature of a planet, then we can dig up Al (I invented the internet) Gore and kick him in his corpsey baby-maker.

This article is misleading. Instead of saying Mars is "ideally suited for crop farming", you should have said Mars is "more water-efficient for crop farming". Because water efficiency is NOT the only thing you have to worry about when it comes to growing crops.

But what's interesting here is this: plants that evolved in Earth's gravity (an acceleration of ~9.8m/s^2) can live more efficiently on Mars (an acceleration of ~3.7m/s^2), assuming the radiation and temperature issues are considered. So people who think every living creature is "designed" to live here should think about that... just a little.

-IMP ;) :)

iceMetalPunk:
you're saying that there is no God because mars has weaker gravity?

If you believe that mars will ever be colonized by humans then I got a plot of land on Mars I would like to sell ya.

Now colonized by robots? That's definitely possible. Humans can't live anywhere but earth. We are here for the duration.

In fifty words or less would someone PLEASE tell me why ?
What's with other than 'make work for scientists' going to Mars ? I ain't going to live on Mars. Neither is my kid. NOBODY wants to live on Mars. Who would want to ? It is a waste of good cash. Imho.