Interesting technology - human hair

A curious use for Human Hair -- growing plants. From the Miami Herald-Tribune

Human hair market growing fast
Imported from China and India, it is an ingredient in many products

Walking into the small Florida City warehouse, Blair Blacker pauses to survey the towering pyramid of canvas bundles, each about the size of a punching bag, that contain the stock-in-trade of his business: human hair.

About 15 tons of it on a recent day, imported from China, neatly pressed into mats and ready to ship to farmers and nursery growers who swear by the horticultural benefits of Blacker's hairy wares.

"If you had told me when I was flying combat helicopters in Vietnam that one day I'd be sitting on 30,000 pounds of human hair," said Blacker, a retired Army colonel-turned-entrepreneur, "I'd have said you were crazy."

The mats stored in southern Miami-Dade County are part of a world marketplace for human hair. Uses range from the obvious, such as false eyelashes and wigs, to the more obscure: it is a common raw-material source for l-cysteine, an amino acid frequently used in baked goods such as pizza dough and bagels.

Didn't know that hair was supposed to be in the pizza. Blacker's specific product:

Luis Naranjo, owner of one of the largest wholesale nursery operations in South Miami-Dade, swears by the hirsute stuff.

"In the beginning, we were saying, 'Human hair? What is this?'" Naranjo said. He now expects 80 percent of his nearly 1 million plants, like ground orchids, at Octavio Taylor Nurseries will be cozily blanketed with the mats by this spring.

The hair mats saved him $45,000 in pesticides last year, and $200,000 in labor. "We can't raise our prices the way the market is today, so we need to keep expenses down," said Naranjo, who has been a grower for two decades.

The mats range in size from 25-foot sheets that can be custom-cut for row crops like tomatoes to golfball-sized cubes to tuck around the roots of potted ficus trees.

Mulch, it's dark so it absorbs the sun's heat (crucial for 'maters and permeable to water but resistant to weeds poking through and as it biodegrades, it releases 15% Nitrogen to the soil. The SmartGrow website is here: SmartGrow Retail is about $2 / sq. ft. depending on style of mat.