LED grow lamps ....
... not all they are cracked up to be. Much less yield than (say) HPS or MH.
Although it does depend what exactly you are growing.
As promised, astronauts aboard the International Space Station have eaten the first ever "fresh food grown in the microgravity environment of space" - "Outredgeous" red romaine lettuce. Astronauts Scott Kelly, Kjell Lindgren and Kimiya Yui were the first to sample the produce from the Veggie orbiting vegetable patch, although …
I'm trying to work out whether brewing would actually work in space.
As yeast grows and dies it rises and sinks through the beer with different yeasts doing different things.
No gravity would imply no up/down rising/falling. Would the yeast actually function properly?
Perhaps we need to work out an XPrize mission to find out. After all, this is very important; sending a mission to Mars and beyond with no beer would be seriously bad for morale.
Bindun: http://www.space.com/23141-space-beer-student-space-station-experiment.html
"How much 'Space Lettuce' would you have to grow to get you to MARS and back?"
I was thinking along the lines of the American Indians' "Three Maidens", Corn, beans, and squash planted together.
Simple, easy to grow, and about as nutritionally complete as vegan fare gets. Just make sure to pack lime for nixtamalizing the corn.
And to make sure the mission succeeds, look the other way when when some astronaut smuggles a pig onboard. :)
I think the logical next step is space farming.
I mean, you can grow food for the cows now, and if you were to just use those pygmy ones, you could have a little herd floating about up there.
And as they wouldn't need to use any muscles, even the rump steak would be awesome.
I'm sure it'll be sold in M&S for 100 times the price, so those with too much money can spend it.