Proposed Strawboard Plant Could Help To Resolve Stubble Dilemma

Agribusiness entrepreneurs Don Phillips of Harrington and Dave Eakin of Richland believe they have at least a partial answer to one of this area’s most burning issues.

They propose to stop torching thousands of acres of wheat and grass stubble and use the straw to build homes.

No, not straw houses. Strawboard houses.

Strawboard is a wood substitute like particleboard made by compressing straw in place of wood chips.

Phillips, a Lincoln County wheat grower, and Eakin, an agricultural products engineer for Battelle Northwest laboratories, are principals of Northwest Strawboard in Richland. This spinoff from Battelle’s Agribusiness Commercialization and Development Center is trying to raise $10.5 million to build a plant in Pasco.

So far, the organizers have secured a $5.5 million loan, negotiated a $1.6-million equity investment by an equipment manufacturer, and raised $250,000 in capital from a cross section of agribusiness and construction investors, Eakin reports.

“A lot of people think strawboard is a great product and the plant is a terrific project,” says Eakin, who has taken an “entrepreneurial leave of absence” from his job as director of Battelle’s agribusiness center to start the new business.

The idea for the plant is to make economically viable commercial use of a product of marginal value that often gets plowed under, sometimes get burned, and constantly gets growers in trouble with public health officials, air pollution authorities, and state regulators.

In the fertile Palouse country and irrigated parts of the Columbia Basin, wheat and grass typically produce two to three tons of straw per acre. That’s too much to leave on the ground. The cost of cutting and bailing it can run $100 an acre for a by-product with limited marketability, farmers, agronomists and agricultural extension agents all agree.

“With a weak market for the straw, and poor prices for wheat, it gets harder and harder for growers not to drop a match,” says Phillips, 1995 president of the Washington Association of Wheat Growers. “But we’ve got a ready market for strawboard. We just don’t have enough equity money raised yet to build the plant.

“There’s one outfit in Spokane that will take 11,000 sheets of strawboard a day - which is one-third the output of the plant we want to build in Pasco.”

But solving the burning problem isn’t that simple.

Sometimes burning is the best option, from a production perspective, growers argue. Several county extension agents and agronomists with whom I talked agreed.

Depending on disease, pestilence, soil conditions, and a myriad of other variables, sometimes a little burning of the stubble left after straw removal can boost production and lower cost.

“Cityfolks, health officials and environmentalists, of course, want no burning,” says Eakins, “and regulators are clamping down. But irregardless of who wins the burning argument, you still have to get rid of all that straw, and we’ve got the answer to that. We’ll pay $40 to $50 a ton.”

A ton of straw makes 33 strawboard panels measuring 4-by-8 feet. A manufacturing operation would consume up to 50,000 tons a year.

Plans call for a second plant in Moses Lake and a third in Spokane - “if,” says Phillips, “we can get the necessary investors.”

SIRTI to host commercialization conference

Some of the world’s foremost experts on bringing new products to the market will gather in Spokane Oct. 5 through 7 for an International Commercialization Conference, organizers say.

The Spokane Intercollegiate Research & Technology Institute (SIRTI) will play host in cooperation with the U.S. Commerce Department.

The event is designed for entrepreneurs, product development specialists, private investors, policy-makers, technology transfer managers, educators and government officials.

“We expect to create power alliances, networks and coalitions that expand capabilities to critical resources for all participants,” says SIRTI’s executive director, Lyle Anderson.

Bake sales immune from tax collector

The state tax collector won’t be taking a bite out of neighborhood bake sales hereafter in Washington.

Civic and fraternal festivals, auctions, pancake breakfasts and spaghetti feeds, bazaars, kissing booths, and other nonprofit fund-raisers are no longer subject either to sales taxes or business and occupation taxes.

Such periodic events are exempted under a new law which was unanimously passed by the last Legislature, get this, at the request of the State Revenue Department.

“We and the taxpayers were spending a lot of time looking at records over a pitifully small amount of money,” explains the department’s Russ Brubaker, assistant director for legislation and policy.