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New Food-Growth Product a Bit Hairy
MeatBag PussRocket writes "An article from Marketplace.org reports, 'A Florida company has developed an all-natural product that it says could revolutionize how food is grown in the US. It's called Smart Grow, but it might be a tough sell. It's inexpensive. It eliminates the need for pesticides, so it's environmentally friendly, but it's human hair. Plant pathologists at the University of Florida have found the mats eliminate weeds better than leading herbicides and can also make plants grow up to 30 percent larger.'"
Of dangerous chemicals, animal manure, or human hair, people are squeamish about the human hair?
What about wool from sheep or other animals? That might be cheaper...
C - the footgun of programming languages
Another donor item.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Lots of things eliminate weeds better than herbicides. Any sufficiently impermeable material used as mulch eliminates weeds better than herbicides. Most gardeners are familiar with the concept of a weed barrier.
I used to use sheep manure over newspaper both as a source of nitrogen (and other minerals) and as a weed barrier. It was nearly 100% effective. Given the labor involved, however, I'm sure herbicide would have been more cost-effective at preventing weed growth.
The question is whether applying a barrier against weeds is more cost-effective than herbicides, and I don't know the answer to that, especially considering the environmental impact of herbicides. Just looking at effectiveness of the material doesn't tell us much.
One other note -- sure it's inexpensive now, since there is an incredible amount of wasted human hair. But if this were ever deployed widely, I think we'd see prices of shorn hair go up, and I question whether there'd be enough to meet demand until it cost the same as other methods.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
The idea of using mulch to control weeds is at least 4000 years old. Sure, it works really well. Why use hair? Buy bales of hay, and break off 20 cm thick flakes. Put them over the ground end-to-end, leaving spaces for the crop stems.
And there's the reason people have moved to pesticides: it isn't labor-intensive. You don't win anything by having hand labor to install something that only increases your yield 30% unless you're a backyard gardener. You can spray pesticides over 50 acres in an afternoon.
I use hay to mulch in my garden. It works amazingly well. At the end of the year it's broken-down enough that the tomato roots have grown up into the lowest layer, right at the ground level, to use the proto-compost. The only drawback is seeds in the hay sprouting when it's rototilled in.
Likewise, ground cloth with holes cut out for the plants you want, works really well -- better than pesticides -- but then you have to deal with a bunch of somewhat broken-down ground cloth at the end of the year.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
samzenpus's campaign to gradually introduce awful articles that should have been in idle onto the main site continues. The plan seems to be to post one or two of these every day until we no longer think of them as odd. Then they can increase the rate a bit, eventually merge idle entirely into the main site, and voila! Slashdot can be as hip and successful of a site as digg is!
History up to this point:
April 28 - Tokyo Scientists Create Mobile Slime
April 27 - Air Force One Flyby Causes Brief Panic In NYC
April 27 - How To Have an Online Social Life When You're Dead
April 23 - Race Car Made With Veggies And Powered By Chocolate
April 22 - Robotic Penguins
April 22 - Yamaha Unveils Golf Cart Powered By Cow Dung
April 21 - Biotech Company to Patent Pigs
April 21 - The Taste of Space
April 17 - Philosophies and Programming Languages
Do we really want the guy behind the worst articles I've ever seen on slashdot shaping the direction of this site?
Sturgeon was an optimist.
You're close. Actually, hair is an excellent fertilizer because it's something like 14% nitrogen. Other wonderful fertilizers include bones and blood. Imagine that, dead animals make good fertilizer! This is what nature has been doing with dead plants and animals for a long, long time.
Yes, there is. The waste gets on the plant, the waste contains waste born illnesses, the chicken eats the waste contaminated plant and becomes a carrier/host for the infectious agent, you eat the animal and YOU become sick. There's a reason we don't feed animals meat anymore, it leads to a circle of infection that is MUCH more likely to end in food-born illness for us.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
That's because the average person has become so very disconnected with how food is grown and harvested. Using human waste as a source of fertilizer isn't an unusual one. I believe I had read somewhere that one of the obstacles in building London's original sewers was that most people were collecting their fecal matter in the cellars of their houses and selling it to farmers for fertilizer. For some, I guess the profit motive was greater than the fear of getting sick and/or dying because of the fumes.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs