Lefsrud, Mark

Food security has become an increasing concern in Canada and around the world. Many individuals and families do not have access to fresh, nutritional food either because it is too costly, the food is not fresh anymore or it is not available at that time of year. The cost of most food is greatly increased due to the fact that food is transported by truck or plane over long distances to reach the consumer, with most fresh produce coming from Florida or California. These transported fresh foods such as fruits and vegetables can be damaged and lose some of their nutritional value during the transport making the purchase of these products even less appealing. The alternative choice to fresh food is highly processed foods, low in nutritional value. The constant consumption of these highly processed foods are impacting and causing severe consequences to the northern population’s health. Our solution is to move the production of these fresh fruits and vegetables closer to the consumer, specifically into the towns and cities and developing a technology known as Urban Agriculture or vertical farming.

Urban Agriculture is the idea of food production in an urban agricultural setting and has been proposed by a number of companies using a range of technologies. The major focus of our researched are: energy reduction (light and heat), selection of species and cultivars for this specific growing environment and determining the nutritional improvement of plants grown within the system. A major focus of our laboratory is improving lighting methods using LEDs within the building and developing methods to use renewable energy sources for heating and carbon dioxide production.

Space Biology Research: Before joining McGill University, Dr Lefrud worked for Orbitec (a commercial space flight hardware design company, now Sierra Space Corporation). During this time, he designed and co-developed two technologies that are currently on the ISS, the Veggie and the Advanced Plant Habitat (APH). In 2018 and 2019, he was invited to participate in two NASA workshops at the Kennedy Space Center that led to the joint NASA- Canadian Space Agency’s Deep Space Food Challenge. He led McGill University’s MARTLET (McGill Advanced bio-Regenerative Toolkit for Long-Excursion Trips) team, which was awarded first round funding for cricket rearing and an algae production system. One team progressed to the final round. Another MARTLET team competed in the CSA’s Aqualunar Challenge, progressing to the 2nd round. Dr. Lefsrud has since worked on several CSA contracts for BLSS. The Biomass Production Lab is actively contributing to a new wave of extended space mission research and training students in this sector, through the development of a crop selection framework for extended space missions, remote plant health monitoring, and solutions for ensuring food safety. More recently, Dr. Lefsrud and researchers in the Biomass Production Lab have worked with Canadensys Aerospace Corp. and the University of Guelph to fulfill subcontractor requirements for the Lunar Agricultural Module-Ground Test Demonstrator (LAM-GTD), in collaboration in the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the DLR (German Aerospace Center). Further research collaboration is occurring with ESA.