Things you should know about. Sit up. Pay attention. Below is a picture of what your welcome mat comes from, what you dip into hot water to make your tea (no, no, not tea, the teabags), the stuffing in your car seats, the carpets you walk on, the wallpaper you look at, string and ropes of all shapes and sizes. And, since oil hit $90+ dollars a barrel, a more cost effective substitute for durable plastic and fibreglass. Think about all that stuff made out of hard plastic and fibreglass. Now think about growing it instead of squeezing and extracting and chemically rendering it out of oil.

a field of growing plastic

Sisal. The wonder crop of East Africa and beyond. Grows right up to the dessert and will thrive on as little as 120mm of rain a year. It could definitely survive a hosepipe ban. We’ve met the bloke responsible for leading the research into it. He’s spent most of his working life on it. His dream is to see it being used to eradicate the Sahara dessert. All apparently quite possible apart from the politics. Not a bad dream and puts my dream of owning a members only bar on a beach on Bali selling nothing but Federation Brewery Ale and North Shields haddock and double fried chips (mushy peas and onion gravy a side dish option) into harsh perspective.

It’s only the leaf veins that go into the above products (no, no, not the haddock and chips, the products preceding the haddock and chips bit). The residue is dried and used as crop feed. Cows love the stuff apparently. It also contains something called hecogenin. Steroids to you and me. China has consequently put vast swathes of land under sisal and they now lay claim to 80% of the world’s steroid production, legal or otherwise. It’s also a self pollinator so no expensive pollination crops and rotations. The plant produces about 250 leaves in its life time. Towards the end it shoves up a stiff, tensile stalk and produces hundreds of thousands of mini sisal pods.

stiff and tensile

You simply lop them off and stick them in the next available plot. The stalks themselves are apparently stronger than carbon fibre and are being researched for their industrial use. All that from one plant. Good stuff, eh. And I thought leeks were useful. They are actually, but that’s another story.