Can you cache out hair geometry for rendering in Mental Ray?

I don't mean creating a cache for the motion. What seems to happen is every time
we stop and start a render, it looks like the hair gets redrawn. The only way to
prevent pops in the hair is to render it all on one machine at one go, which of
course means no distributed solution can work. I figure if I could export to an
*.mi and send that to a farm it might work, but unfortunately I only have Maya
8.5. Is there a way to cache out the paint effect