Harvesting New Products: Straw Used for Furniture

HUTCHINSON, Kan. —  The wheat William Morgan grows was once used only in bread, cereal and other food products. But now his crop is finding its way into cabinets, kitchen counters--even furniture.

The central Kansas farmer no longer lets combines toss the leftover plant stalks on the ground to be burned or plowed into the earth.

This year, Morgan, who farms near Haven, sold the leftover wheat straw to a Hutchinson company that grinds the raw material into a coarse powder, combines it with glue and presses it into a board.

The company is part of a new industry that is looking to the Midwest’s treeless farm fields for raw materials to build items such as office furniture and shipping crates.

The Composite Panel Assn. knows of at least six plants in the United States that are producing or plan to produce boards out of agricultural residue, said Tom Julia, the Gaithersburg, Md., group’s spokesman. But there are probably more factories the association doesn’t know about, Julia said.

“This is all good stuff,” Julia said of the new industry. “It’s good news. Everybody wins.”

Supporters claim the new “strawboard” will replace wood-based particleboard and give wheat farmers more money for their crop. But the strawboard industry still has to prove itself to become commercially successful, Julia said.

Strawboard manufacturers claim their product is stronger, lighter, holds a screw better and is more moisture resistant than wood-based particleboard.

But Julia said that the wheat product’s claims of being better and lighter than particleboard may take time to prove.

Julia’s organization supports the strawboard industry and believes it will become an addition to the particleboard industry, which started as a way to use scrap wood. The price of the two products are about the same.

Most of the 4-by-8-foot boards produced at Cen Kan Enterprises in Hutchinson are sold to the cabinet and ready-to-assemble furniture industry, said Gene Pflughoft, a consultant for the company.

The company is focused on making sure it develops a quality product suitable for its customers. Kevin Richardson, a former chiropractor who is now in charge of quality control for the new $15-million strawboard plant, spends his days testing, breaking and pulling apart boards made of straw.

Cen Kan was started by the members of 11 grain cooperatives in central Kansas who wanted to invest in an industry that would make traditional crops more profitable and bring more money to the cooperatives.

The plant is surrounded by about 50,000 tons of stacked straw bales collected for the past three years and stored under plastic tarps. The 4-by-8-foot boards produced at the plant are 97% wheat straw and 3% resin, a type of glue.

Strawboard plants around the world also use stalks from rice and sugar-cane plants to make boards similar to strawboard, said John Marwood, interim general manager at Cen Kan.

Marwood works for Compak Systems, a British company that sells equipment to produce strawboard. The Hutchinson plant is Compak’s first in North America, Marwood said.

Cen Kan has one production line that will produce about 1,000 boards a day. It plans to add two more lines, possibly by the end of 1998.