The intertwined fate of agriculture and human expansion: Gaps and solutions for scalable space crop systems

Societal Impact Statement As humanity prepares for sustained life beyond Earth, developing resilient, resource‐efficient food systems is essential. This research outlines a strategic roadmap for scalable space agriculture, addressing key challenges in crop resilience, substrate performance, and autonomous life‐support integration. By adapting terrestrial advances in regenerative agriculture, microbiome science, and edge‐AI automation to extraterrestrial conditions, we demonstrate pathways toward sustainable off‐world food production. Beyond space exploration, these innovations strengthen Earth's capacity to combat climate‐induced food insecurity, soil degradation, and labor constraints, empowering global policy, industry, and research partnerships to ensure food security and human flourishing both on and beyond our home planet. Summary As space agencies and private companies move toward long‐duration missions on the Moon and Mars, the scalability of plant‐based life support systems becomes a cornerstone of off‐world sustainability. This work identifies and contextualizes the most pressing challenges for developing modular, automated, and biologically robust crop systems for off‐world cultivation. Drawing on advances in regenerative agriculture, microbiome engineering, and controlled‐environment phenotyping, we propose a roadmap for translating Earth‐based innovations into closed‐loop systems capable of sustaining human life beyond Earth. We argue that the next leap in the off‐world agricultural revolution demands the convergence of plant biology, synthetic ecology, space architecture, and bioinformatics. Only by integrating these disciplines can humanity engineer the agro‐ecologies necessary for feeding off‐world settlements, ensuring food security, and supporting bioregenerative life support systems. As we move beyond the Blue Planet, it is clear that agriculture remains fundamental to the continuance of civilization.