🌕Moon Hummus: Growing Food Beyond Earth

Scientists have grown and harvested chickpeas in simulated moon dirt. The key ingredients: worm compost and symbiotic fungi. A small harvest with enormous implications for how humans might one day live on the Moon.

The Moon's surface is covered in regolith — a sharp, glassy, powdery material left by billions of years of meteor impacts. It contains no organic matter, no microorganisms, and several toxic heavy metals. It is, in short, the opposite of soil.

And yet. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, working with Texas A&M University, have grown and harvested chickpeas in a material designed to simulate it. Their results were published in Scientific Reports in March 2026.

The recipe for moon farming

The team didn't try to grow plants in raw lunar simulant — that doesn't work. Instead, they built a living system around it.

First, they mixed the simulated moon dirt with vermicompost — a nutrient-rich material produced by earthworms digesting food scraps and organic waste. This is the same kind of organic material that future astronauts might generate simply by living: food waste, cotton clothing, biodegradable materials.

Second, they coated the chickpea seeds with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi before planting. These fungi form a partnership with plant roots, extending their reach into difficult soil, pulling in nutrients, and — critically — limiting the uptake of heavy metals.

The combination worked. Chickpea plants sprouted, flowered, and produced harvestable seeds in mixtures containing up to 75% lunar simulant. Beyond that threshold, the plants showed stress and died early. But even stressed, fungi-treated plants survived two weeks longer than those without fungal help.

Why chickpeas?

Most space crop research focuses on leafy greens. Chickpeas were chosen for different reasons: they are high in protein, stress-tolerant, and they actively recruit microorganisms that help them survive. They are, in a sense, good collaborators.

Jessica Atkin, the doctoral candidate who led the planting, noted with quiet humor that she asked to eat the harvested chickpeas. The answer was no — safety tests are still needed to confirm no toxic metals were absorbed. When those tests pass, she says, she'll be the first to make moon hummus.

The bigger picture

NASA's Artemis programme is preparing for extended human presence on the Moon, with longer missions in the coming years. Hauling food from Earth for those missions would be prohibitively expensive. Systems that can convert lunar waste into fertilizer and use biological partnerships to coax plants from sterile soil represent a more sustainable path — not just for the Moon, but potentially for degraded and depleted soils here on Earth too.

What successful lunar farming may ultimately require, this research suggests, is not brute-force chemistry. It is carefully assembled living systems. The same lesson, perhaps, that applies to farming anywhere.