And that’s the whole problem with Mars.
We are spending billions of dollars and no small amount of imagination trying to reach a planet whose air would kill us in minutes. Mars is about 96% carbon dioxide and a fraction of a percent oxygen. Ours is roughly 21% oxygen — and almost every molecule of it was exhaled by plants and their photosynthetic ancestors over billions of years. The air in your lungs right now is a plant product.
That reframes the whole comparison. Mars isn’t just a world without plants. It’s a preview of the atmosphere Earth would have if photosynthesis ever stopped. We’re captivated by a dead planet while paying almost no attention to the living system that makes our own planet breathable, feeds us, builds our soil, and stocks our medicine cabinet. The most advanced life-support technology ever devised is growing quietly outside your window, and most of us walk past it without a second look.
Here’s what should stop us in our tracks: we’re only now beginning to learn what plants are actually doing.
Plants Can Hear. And They Can Speak.
For most of agricultural history we treated the plant as a passive thing — a container you pour inputs into and hope for the best. The last few years of science have made that view look almost quaint.
In 2023, researchers at Tel Aviv University published a study in the journal Cell showing that plants under stress emit sound — airborne ultrasonic clicks, something like the pop of bubble wrap, at frequencies far above human hearing. A stressed plant clicked dozens of times an hour; an unstressed one stayed nearly silent. And the part that matters for anyone who farms for a living: the plants began sounding off before they showed any visible sign of drought stress. A machine-learning model could even tell drought apart from injury by ear. They recorded it in tomato, corn, wheat — and in Cabernet Sauvignon grapevines.
It runs the other way, too. Plants don’t just make vibrations; they listen for them and act on what they hear. Some plants detect the specific vibration of a caterpillar chewing on a leaf and pre-load their chemical defenses in response — distinguishing a feeding insect from wind or birdsong. Evening primrose can sense the wingbeat of an approaching bee and, within minutes, sweeten its nectar to reward the pollinator; the bowl of the flower works like an ear. Roots appear to orient toward the sound of moving water, not just the moisture gradient.
Should we call this a nervous system? Not exactly — plants have no neurons, and scientists rightly debate the language. But what they undeniably have is real long-distance signaling. Wound a single leaf and a wave of electrical and chemical messaging travels through the whole plant, switching on defenses in tissue the insect hasn’t even reached yet. Sensing. Communicating. Deciding. Responding. Whatever we call it, it is not the behavior of a passive container.
We Haven’t Even Scratched the Surface
Now bring it back to the field, because this is where the idea earns its keep.
If the plant is sensing and signaling and defending itself all day long, then the job of a crop program was never to override that system with brute force. It’s to support what the plant already knows how to do. And increasingly, the most interesting tools for doing that come from plants themselves — algae extracts, botanical signals, plant-derived compounds used to prime defense and metabolism in other crops. We are, in effect, finally borrowing the plant kingdom’s own playbook and applying it back to agriculture.
And we have barely started. The plant world holds tens of thousands of compounds evolved over hundreds of millions of years to solve exactly the problems we spray, fertilize, and worry over. We’re using a small handful of them. The frontier isn’t a new synthetic molecule — it’s learning to work with the biology that’s already there.
That’s the whole philosophy in one sentence: we’re not fighting the plant, we’re supporting a system that’s already listening. The soil has to work before the plant can perform — and the plant, it turns out, has been performing, communicating, and problem-solving all along. We just weren’t paying attention.
We don’t need to reach Mars to find undiscovered life worth studying. It’s under our boots. It’s in every leaf. And the next real chapter in agriculture belongs to the growers who stop farming against the plant and start farming with it.
Deac Jones is the founder of Andaman Ag Corporation and the author of From the Ground Up. Reach him at Deac@Andaman-Ag.com.
