Bamboo has come into vogue as a green, sustainable resource that's used for everything from cutting boards to clothing to wood floors. But until now, almost all of the bamboo in products sold here has come from overseas. That could change soon, as new planting techniques may lead to millions of new acres of bamboo shoots in the American South.
Could the Mississippi Delta become America's bamboo belt, the breadbasket of a new class of homegrown structural building components? Earlier this June in Greenville, Miss., a group of engineers, manufacturers, bureaucrats and farmers gathered to discuss how land formerly cultivated for cotton might be converted to produce bamboo on a massive scale. Teragren, the world's largest bamboo building products manufacturer, has engineered new structural joists made of imported Moso, a bamboo species with the tensile strength of steel. Teragren VP Tom Goodham says a domestic Moso source is the key to renewable structural timber becoming mainstream and affordable: "The whole bamboo building-products category is just on the cusp of critical mass."
He's not the only one feeling optimistic after the meeting. Attendee Jackie Heinricher, owner of Boo-Shoot garden, has devised a method to clone mature culms of Moso grass. The plants flower only once every 60 to 100 years, so growing quantities from seedlings is impractical. When planted as cuttings, she adds, plants don't survive at a profitable level. Clones are the answer. "We're talking about planting hundreds of thousands, if not millions of acres," Heinricher says. "This technology makes it possible." Foreign bamboo kingpins have approached Heinricher with offers to buy her technology. She has kept her secret, which took a decade of research to create. "I always held fast to this vision of a U.S. source," she says. Goodham adds that importing bamboo is not inherently wrong—he says about 90 percent of China's bamboo comes from sustainably maintained ancient forests—but postearthquake revisions to China's building codes may lead to more structural bamboo use there, stretching the current supply worldwide. Plus, "In general, when you can manufacture items closer to where they'll be consumed, you lower the environmental impact," Goodham says.
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