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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?
and can also make plants grow up to 30 percent larger.'"
Maybe someone needs to use this idea to make a super penis pill!
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.
Smart Grow is people!
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
I would expect that any hair works since Hair being made of protein is rich in nitrogen.
Now they really can do something about world hunger!
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
That's not so bad. My HS science teacher told me about an experiment where people off the street were given free chicken and asked how it tastes, etc. Later they were told that the chickens were fed plants grown exclusively from human waste. They didn't eat any more of the chicken after being told this.
But, there's absolutely nothing wrong with eating an animal which has been fed plants grown on manure, human or otherwise :P
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
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
Good to know. I could probably solve world hunger with the cat hair under my furniture.
Maybe I'll be able to get my head and crotch zoned as agricultural now. My efforts to get them zoned commercial were deemed illegal outside of Nevada.
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
I would suspect that human hair would be cheaper as there isn't any other use for it.
It's used a lot in wigs.
It's human hair because, being at the top of the food chain, all those nasty chemicals like herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers collect in our bodies in the highest concentrations. Thus our hair is chock-full-o-chemicals. It's no wonder human hair mats have all these wondrous properties -- they are really just recycling all those chemicals we've been putting into the environment for the last 50 years.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Galactic hunger could be solved with Stallman's beard!
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
So just where is all this hair coming from, exactly? Are there 3rd world hair factories where children will be surreptitiously filmed hanging from the ceiling with their hair attached to hooks to make it grow faster, videos of natives explaining just how many beads they get paid for a pound of hair which figures out to a monthly income equivalent of 63 cents, and the poor orphans trotting out missing chunks from their ear where the evil corporate barbers sheared just a bit too fast and cut them for squirming? Will we see Sally Struthers begging us for just $1 a day so the poor hairless masses CAN AFFORD WIGS?!?!
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
I will then have to put up with people asking if I'm ok, have I lost my job, why am I selling my hair for fertilizer?
Nature can be so cruel.
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.
I am soooo cashing in on this! I have hair down to my ass, so lets just say my shower gets clogged frequently. How much do you think they buy it for? I've never died/permed/etc...
:D
This is just like Christmas, only better
i r in ur
Plastic weed barriers are sold on rolls in your friendly local hardware store. A layer of black plastic plus a layer of bark on top is very effective and used by gardeners everywhere.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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.
Shaving your nether regions and using it as a fake beard....
When I was in High School, some of the girls there sold their hair once a year to one of the hair product companies, I believe Clairol, but I could be wrong. Pretty sure it was used for testing hair products.
They actually got quite a bit for it, depending on the length, color and how much they treated it. I remember going to a keg party that was financed by such a girl cashing in on her hair.
I also remember that one of those same girls always had these crazy long fingernails, as she sold those as well.
This is like some bizarro world variation of a Chia-head, but I'm not sure how.
..........FULL STOP.
I can see it now - there will be some weed that will adapt to grow on this stuff - something will make the jump. Then we will start to see people who "catch" an infection of dandelions on their head.
New! - Head & Shoulders with Ortho 5 weed killer!!
..........FULL STOP.
seems like an ecodisaster
Why? Something that doesn't degrade... isn't a problem. We make all kinds of things that don't degrade - bricks and concrete, for example - and they're not ecodisasters. They do occupy landfill space, but very few places are really at any risk of running out of landfill space. As long as they don't have toxic leachates - such as older, metallic newspaper inks - there's really very little concerning about plastics per se. (Interesting tip for the young: did you know why Styrofoam first became a bugbear of the environmental movement? Not because it doesn't biodegrade - it's harmless insulation, after all - but because it was blown into foam using CFCs.)