About

Plumas Wood Fiber was initiated in early 2022, after the devastating wild fires of 2020-21 in Northern California, which left 2 million acres of forest burned, much of it with very high severity. We have a solution to this problem of high severity wild fires, which is to reduce the biomass in our overgrown forests. But how to remove the excess biomass? There needs to be a commercial market for the material to pay the cost of the work of thinning the forest and chipping up all that biomass.

With a sense of emergency, people in the Northern California Sierra mountains, and elsewhere, have been looking for ways to commercialize forest biomass. One way that has emerged in recent decades is the production of horticultural wood fiber substrate as a replacement/supplement to the use of peat moss. So, the Plumas Wood Fiber Group was formed, a group of local citizens dedicated to an idea that has not yet been manifested in western forests, though it has in Europe and elsewhere.

Members of the group include:

-Dr. Brian Jackson, North Carolina State University Raleigh, Horticultural Substrates Laboratory.

-Jack Bobo, NC State Doctoral Candidate.

-John Sheehan, Plumas County resident with extensive experience in local development.

-Dr. Cindy Chen, University of California Extension, woody biomass and wood products advisor.

-Sally McGowan, Board of Directors, Plumas Fire Safe Council

-Kevin Danaher, Co-founder, Global Exchange

-Paul Mrowczinski, grant writer/planner

-Jeff Greef, retired building inspector