A flowering perennial ryegrass spike
Perennial ryegrass is fed to livestock in the United States and many other countries. The Artec Space Spider is a handheld 3D scanner created for use on the International Space Station. Travis Tubbs is a major with U.S. Space Force using the scanner to measure ryegrass varieties on Earth and help identify specific plants with the most desirable traits for breeders and farmers.
The problem here is with seeds that fall off too early. In the state of Oregon alone, where Tubbs has conducted published research, 360 million pounds of ryegrass seed was harvested in 2019, valued at more than $186 million. But 20% of the ryegrass grown there very year is lost due to something called “early seed shattering,” when seeds break off from the plant prematurely.
Artec Studio x-ray representation of a scan of a perennial ryegrass spike
Tubbs says creating 3D scans of individual plants, a simple process that takes about a minute, can help scientists pinpoint plants with the most desirable traits and outcomes in the field and use them to breed superior ryegrass and other kinds of plants, from rice and barley and wheat to fruits and vegetables.
These superior plants will be highly insect-resistant and drought tolerant, and require little to no pesticides, he says.
“Technology is going to march forward and this is a great tool that can be used to help all farmers in analyzing what’s out in their field.”
Space Force and the Spider
The Space Force, the newest branch of the U.S. Armed Forces, was established in December 2019, before Tubbs started the project.
He’s a professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado who teaches in the Biology Department and conducted his research at Oregon State University. Space Force is part of the Air Force.
Travis Tubbs
Tubbs came across the Artec Space Spider while looking for ways to study ryegrass and early seed shattering. “I was literally going to build my own camera system to make this work,” he says.
His research involved using the Space Spider to precisely capture ryegrass spikes and literally count the number of seeds that particular plants were losing every week. Coming back to specific plants was as simple as marking them with pieces of tape, then using intuitive software to analyze the scans, Tubbs says.
The advantage to 3D scans is that you can observe the unique characteristics of a plant, twisting a stalk around, for instance, to see how many seeds a spike of ryegrass has retained.
One big takeaway of the research: “The height of the plant has something to do with how well it can retain seeds,” Tubbs says. “The taller the plant, the less likely it is to hold on to those seeds. So you want to breed shorter plants.”
Also, plants with a wider angle of spikes, or spikes that don’t grow too closely together, are more desirable.
Throughout two years of the project, Tubbs had 640 ryegrass plants under his care, originating from seeds collected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture from 40 different locations around the world. A total of 160 individual plants in the field were measured six to eight times over the duration of the work. The Artec Space Spider costs about $20,000.
The Moon and Mars
At first blush, you might think this ryegrass research by a Space Force major has something to do with growing crops for upcoming missions to the moon, or Mars.
“Not yet, but this is definitely something that’s useful for that,” Tubbs says. “You can digitize a 3D structure and send it off to whenever you need, around the world.” Or above the world.
Tubbs predicts that improved plant varieties derived from 3D scanning will be sprouting from the ground in the near future—maybe a decade or more. And farmers can be involved in using the technology.
“As the world population continues to grow, we’ve got to get better and faster at producing food.”
