Agriculture

Matter compilation and genetic engineering saw a rather startling upheaval to the agricultural industry. Genetic engineering paved the way to an infinitely varying amount of hybrid "super crops", but matter compilers could then match their chemical composition exactly, printing out completely natural juice or blocks of flesh. With hunger being solved by compilers, agriculture adapted and moved in a different direction. Scientists began bioengineering plants, fungi, and microbes that consumed less useful or wasteful materials, notably the leftover byproducts of sewage repurposing, and produced more useful elements as a byproduct.

Gengie-Flora Farms
Farmers don a protective suit and breathing mask before stepping into the carefully maintained greenhouses. Atmosphere is pumped in; a toxic, poisonous miasma of cheap elemental gasses, and the plants thrive. A wide variety of plants ranging from glassy, crystalline succulent-like plants to colorful, oily fern-like plants, beds of glittering, metallic moss and lichen, and underground collections of coral-like fungi are cultivated for their naturally-occurring Sulfur, Arsenic, Bromine, Lithium, Potassium, Nickel, Iron, Molybdenum, Tungsten, and more. These gengie-flora farms are the primary source of such elements, and have largely replaced asteroid mining in civilized space. However, the genetic templates for these plants are patented and owned by a handful of corporations, and the cost for the seed plus the registration and license to use it can be extremely expensive to a remote Free Colony. Here, asteroid mining and scrap diving are still the most prevalent source of these elements in Wild Space, and farming is usually reduced to microbe-cultivating. Although much less costly and much more flexible and adaptive than bioengineering plant life, cultivating genetically engineered bacteria has a much lower yield than crops, meaning outposts are still heavily reliant upon mining and scrap reclamation for their materials.