You don’t get a first-of-its-kind production site overnight, especially one capable of processing 280,000 tons of rice straw and producing 140 million sq ft of MDF annually. In our case, it took more than 30 years and involved overcoming numerous challenges. The following recap will shed light on some of the most important milestones during this extraordinary journey of innovation and determination.
Jim Boyd, a lifelong rice farmer, businessman and entrepreneur in Glenn County, California, searches for a way to make a major, permanent economic contribution in the farming community where his family has deep roots.
When the State of California mandated the phasing out of field-burning, Glenn County area rice growers resort to flooding their fields with water to aid the straw’s decomposition in preparation for spring planting despite the waste of that precious natural resource.
Working with the English company Compac, Boyd experiments with recycling post-harvest rice straw to make particle board, which has been successfully manufactured with wheat straw. Efforts are unsuccessful. Boyd redirects his focus and aligns his efforts with those of Jerry Uhland, another Glenn County rice farmer, agronomist and scientist, who suggests using rice straw to make MDF board instead. Together, they form the company CalAg LLC.
Boyd and Uhland ship the first container of rice straw overseas to Bangor, Wales, where scientists at the Biocomposites Centre of Bangor University eventually succeed in making a viable straw-based MDF product.
In 2003, as a result of the team’s extensive agrifiber research and development, CalAg is awarded a U.S. process patent for the conversion of rice straw into industrial-grade MDF.
The company works to raise financing for its manufacturing plant and to search for funding partners.
CalAg conducts extensive independent board trials and explores manufacturing partners. They begin to work closely with Siempelkamp, the global leader in composite panel manufacturing equipment. During that year, Jim Boyd passes away and his family members step in to continue to pursue his dream.
The company continues its search for investment partners in a cautious post-recession economic environment.
The California Pollution Control Financing Authority (CPCFA) issues $225 million in tax exempt green bonds to finance the CalAg project. When the bond sale opens in 2016’s post-election disarray, the sale comes up short. However, the CalAg team is not deterred.
On May 24, CalAg opens its sale of California green bonds. The response is overwhelming and the company receives requests for almost four times the number of bonds available. With funding secured, the team unites under a new name: CalPlant I, LLC. Groundbreaking on the first manufacturing plant begins in Willows, California.
Construction of the Willows facility concludes after extended Covid shutdown.
With the manufacturing facility fully operational, CalPant becomes the world’s first commercial-scale producer of annually renewable, rice straw-based medium density fiberboard.
Between 2021 and 2022 CalPlant ships over 3500 truckloads of wood quality and wood price boards to satisfied commercial customers across the USA. Nonetheless, in 2022, bondholders force the company into bankruptcy before the project could achieve steady state production and cash flow.
Project founder Jerry Uhland founds CalFibre LLC along with Earth Protex Group Inc, Jake Kaercher, and Kyoto X. CalFibre buys more than 150,000 tons of rice straw inventory on the site of the bankrupt estate, and establishes a turnaround investment and operation plan for the facility.