I am trying to mow the lawn. Maxon provided a nice video-tutorial about mowing but I wanted to try a different way.
Well it didn't work, but I discovered that the Proximal Shader does very nice things with the Hair Shader.

This is an example of the Proximal shader in the Curl setting of hair.

Read more for some other examples. Heavy page ahead!!

Follow up:

Lets start by some explanation about the proximal shader.
Proximity means nearby something.
What we need is a polygonal object, when this object comes near the object with the proximal shader the shader changes aspect.

This is what the shader looks like;

You need to drag the object into the large field and check some boxes, you have to try the different settings as to find the one that suits you best.

Now for the hair part.
What I did is to add this shader to the Curl tab of a Hair shader.

I made a model to test the setting in animation
The model looks like this, a plane with Hair and a invisible orange pancake;

Here are some results with different settings;

You can also play around with the Scale, Density or whatever channel;

Or even the Color channel;

I had bad luck with the shader in the clump-twisting channel, it just crashes my computer.
As you can see it is fun and there is a lot to discover. it doesn't mow my lawn but could be helpful for other things.