Industry Brief #5 • Counting Is Funding • The Bill Is Still Open
Counting Is Funding
Industry Brief #5
September 2, 2026
Industry Brief #4.1 covered where $105.5 million in federal wood grants went, and what the priorities that steered it look like on paper. This brief covers where those priorities come from and what is still open to change.
Key dates
The Senate returns September 14
The current farm bill extension expires September 30
The critical language can still be added
The farm bill stalled on August 6. The Senate Agriculture Committee failed to advance it, and the fight was over SNAP, not forestry. Title VIII, the forestry section of the farm bill, was not the problem.
That matters because the forestry language never hardened. It is still open, and Title VIII still does not name urban, salvaged, or reclaimed wood.
Members are home in their districts until the fourteenth, which is when you get the best access to them. From there, Congress either reaches a deal or passes another short-term extension. A deal settles Title VIII this year. Another extension pushes the same fight down the road.
What the proposed farm bill would change
The proposed 2026 farm bill makes several changes to federal wood programs. Some could help urban and salvaged wood. One would push federal funding further toward burning wood for energy.
Wood Innovations Grants - The amount of outside money an applicant must provide is cut in half. That is good for us, because smaller mills, manufacturers, nonprofits, and local recovery programs would have a better chance of competing. That is assuming any of the grants are even available for urban and salvaged wood to its highest and best use. This year, they were not. If that remains the case the potential benefit means nothing to this industry.
Sawmill funding - The draft revisits a rule that favors existing sawmills only in counties with higher unemployment. Many urban wood operations sit in metropolitan areas that do not qualify under the current rule, so changing it could open funding to more of them. Could.
Community Wood Grants - The federal share rises from 35 percent to 50 percent of project costs. Grants could reach $5 million, and the program would run through 2031. That helps only if the material and the facilities that process it are clearly eligible, which is the whole point of all of this.
Wood energy - The current draft would allow federal support for wood energy systems as large as 40 megawatts. Federal programs already provide a strong path for turning urban and salvaged wood into energy. Expanding that path without equally recognizing the higher and better uses, lumber, biocomposites, other durable products, and biochar, gives energy yet another advantage.
The proposed farm bill puts more money on better terms on the table, but none of that reaches us unless urban and salvaged wood is named in the program language, especially for higher-value durable products.
The volume and value justify recognition, naming, support, and funding
The census is being rewritten without us
Forest Inventory and Analysis is the national wood census, and every federal number about wood traces back to it. Program funding, market studies, supply projections, and carbon accounting all draw from the same source. Our material is not in it. On paper, seven billion board feet a year does not exist.
The research exists but what is still missing is its inclusion in the systems that drive funding. Two decades of Forest Service and peer-reviewed work sits outside the census, so it informs almost nothing downstream. A community can cite Forest Service research in a grant application. It cannot point to a federal inventory line, because there is not one.
Here is what that costs, depending on where you sit.
The grant application that has to invent its own numbers. Two applicants ask the same program for equipment money. One cites the national inventory for the volume in its supply area. The other builds an estimate from a research paper and a local tree survey. Same program, same reviewer, and only one of them can point at a federal number.
The loan that has nothing to verify against. A yard needs a kiln. The bank asks how much material is available within the haul radius and for how long. Forest-sourced borrowers answer with inventory data the lender can check independently. We answer with our own arithmetic, and an unverifiable supply estimate is a risk premium.
The municipal mill that exists but does not. A municipal operation mills a hundred thousand board feet a year from city trees, dries it, and employs people doing it. That volume appears in no federal wood production figure for its state. The wood was cut, milled, and used, and as far as the count is concerned none of it happened.
The carbon claim that cannot be cited. A specifier wants the carbon story for locally milled urban lumber. The federal tracker will carry figures for forest management and wood products. It carries nothing for this material, so the specifier writes the spec without it.
The more harvest argument. When Washington argues the country needs more domestic wood, the supply table comes from the inventory. Seven billion board feet of urban and salvaged wood potential is not in that table. So the answer to every shortage remains the same, and it is always more harvest.
Uncounted means unfunded, unfunded means the capacity never gets built, and no capacity means no volume to report. So every cycle we rebuild the same case from the same Forest Service estimates, while the real numbers sit in yards and mills across the country, uncounted.
Four provisions in the bill reopen our potential to be counted, and none of them mentions urban or salvaged wood. Getting that added before the committee acts is the whole ask.
Section 8101, Forest Inventory and Analysis strategic plan. Rewrites the plan and calls for timber products output and woodland owner surveys as data-collection methods.
Why it matters: this sets what gets counted for the next decade. A timber products output survey asks mills what they took in and what they shipped, and urban wood processors are not on that survey list. Our volume stays invisible even where it is already being milled.
The ask: direct FIA to include urban and salvaged wood in the national resource and extend the products output survey to processors handling it.
What it is worth: this is the provision that would produce the first real national number the sector has ever had.
The cost of missing it: the census gets rewritten around forest land, and we wait for the next farm bill.
Section 8102, Blue Ribbon Panel. Creates a panel to review the Forest Inventory and Analysis program and recommend changes.
Why it matters: this is a body whose entire job is the question we need asked, which is what the inventory should measure next. It only becomes an opening if we are named in the section that creates it.
The ask: name urban and salvaged wood in the panel’s review scope, and make sure people who actually process this material are part of it.
The cost of missing it: the panel spends its term refining measurement of the forest we already count.
Section 8254, Forest and Wood Products Data Tracker. Requires a public tracker showing the carbon impacts of forest management and wood products.
Why it matters: a federal tracker becomes the reference point buyers, specifiers, and carbon markets use. A product category absent from it has nowhere to point.
The ask: include urban and salvaged wood as a distinct resource category in the tracker.
The cost of missing it: our best argument stays true and uncitable, and every carbon claim we make sits outside the federal record.
A fourth ask, and the cheapest one on this list. The bill directs three new looks at wood data. None of them measures the industry that uses the wood.
Why it matters: the Forest Service has measured the resource for decades and has never measured the value chain that turns it into product. There is no federal figure for finished value, employment, wages, avoided municipal disposal cost, or tax return.
The ask: direct the Forest Service to conduct an economic assessment of the urban and salvaged wood value chain, covering processing capacity, employment, and value added.
Why it is winnable: it is a study, not a program. It commits no money to anyone and creates no eligibility.
The cost of missing it: we keep arguing for federal support with numbers we generated ourselves, against applicants who cite the federal inventory.
None of these provisions writes the plan, the panel’s findings, or the tracker’s categories. That all gets built later, by an agency working from whatever direction the statute gives it. That is why September matters for a tracker that will not exist for years. Agencies build to the direction they are handed.
Name it, count it, fund it.
Biochar showed up in this bill
The Senate draft directs USDA to establish a national biochar research network and adds biochar to research priorities in other programs.
Biochar takes bark, tops, brush, fines, and other low-value woody material that a mill cannot economically turn into a durable product. Properly designed pyrolysis can also recover gas and oil for process energy, turning one ton into both a carbon product and an energy stream.
This is the one pathway where our material starts even. Biochar has no diameter minimum, no grade requirement, and no straightness test. A tree from a boulevard and a thinning off federal land enter the process on identical terms. Building the research network around forest residue would be an exclusion with no technical basis behind it.
It is also arriving into a market that already exists. Three biochar methodologies now carry Core Carbon Principles approval, credits are being issued under them, and demand has doubled annually for two straight years. The research is catching up to the trade rather than leading it.
The ask: name urban and salvaged wood in the network’s scope, and make sure the people who actually process this material are part of it.
The reorganization runs on federal land; our material does not
The Forest Service announced the rest of its reorganization on August 31. Headquarters moves to Salt Lake City, and the agency is replacing its regional structure with state directors.
The stated purpose is bringing the agency closer to the people it serves and empowering the people closest to the ground. The Chief describes it as concentrating resources and decision-making in the states and communities where national forestland is part of the landscape.
Read that qualifier again. The devolution is real, and it runs to communities with federal forest in them.
Meanwhile State and Private Forestry, the one branch built for work on land the agency does not own, no longer appears as a standalone unit on the new chart. That was the house that ran every grant program in this brief, including the urban and community forestry grants. Its functions move under a field operations model, which means urban forestry, and urban and salvaged wood inside it, now sits in a chain of command whose priorities are federal land.
That is the same boundary this brief has been describing all along. It has now been drawn into the org chart.
There is a practical consequence too. Most of the state director jobs are still unfilled, transitions run through the fall, and the state offices are expected to hold six to eight people in liaison roles rather than program delivery. Whoever ends up writing the next funding announcement may be new to this material, and an office in transition is not an office that takes on new priorities.
Which is the strongest argument we have for putting the ask in the bill rather than asking the agency. A funding announcement priority can be rewritten by whoever holds the pen next year. Statutory language survives a reorganization. If we are named in the statute, whatever structure emerges inherits it. If we settle for a promise from the current program office, we are relying on an office that is about to have different people in it.
The states are the other half
The draft increases funding for state Forest Action Plans and gives state forestry agencies more flexibility in how they spend it.
A Forest Action Plan is where a state writes down what its forest resources are, what threatens them, and what it intends to do. Most of them say nothing about urban and salvaged wood. That matters because these plans decide where state forestry money goes, and because federal programs look to them when they ask what a state’s priorities are.
The fix is a conversation with your state forester, and it is available right now. No bill has to pass first.
More money is heading to state Forest Action Plans at the same moment the Forest Service is reorganizing around states. Decision-making is moving to the state level from both directions at once, which means a state forester who names urban and salvaged wood in the next plan revision is putting it into a system that is gaining authority rather than losing it.
What is actually missing
The definition has been done since December 2021 when Urban Salvaged and Reclaimed Woods Inc. (USRW), a nonprofit standards body, approved a North American standard defining urban wood as any wood not harvested for its timber value, diverted or removed from the waste stream and developed into a product, from three sources: deconstruction, fresh cut urban trees, and salvaged trees. It came out of a working group of industry veterans, expert forums, and a sixty-day public comment period, it carries a full chain of custody standard, and the Urban Wood Network endorsed it. It has already been mapped against FSC, PEFC, SFI, and ASTM D7612.
So the question of what this material is, and how you prove where it came from, has been answered and published for four years.
What is missing is adoption, and it gets named where the money is smallest. The 2026 urban and community forestry grant category names this material and its products by name, and it is a one million dollar program on a category that rotates every year. The wood utilization programs that moved $105.5 million this year name none of it. No inventory program counts it. No industry classification code separates the businesses that handle it.
But look at what has been built anyway. Cities from New York to Baltimore to Columbus to Fort Collins have written recovery into their own plans and budgets, and the businesses that mill, dry, and manufacture this material are operating in every region of the country. They did it on almost nothing. A few state programs, CAL FIRE among them. A handful of federal grants at the scale of that one million against a hundred and five. An IRA round that ended or was clawed back. Beyond that, this industry has survived on its own.
And it is still recovering a small fraction while the vast majority goes to chipping and incineration, mill grade logs included. That is seven billion board feet a year of the most American and most local material there is, worth up to $786 million as logs before a board is dried or a product built.
Industry Brief #4.1 puts the finished lumber value at $7.5 to $15 billion. That figure is ours, not the Forest Service’s. It comes from taking the share of that volume Forest Service research treats as realistically recoverable and applying hardwood lumber market prices to it, which is arithmetic anyone can check and disagree with.
We built it because nobody else has. What the finished value actually is, what the jobs are worth, what communities save in avoided disposal, what it returns in wages and taxes, no one has ever measured across the whole chain. The Forest Service measures the trees. It has never measured the industry. The resource is uncounted, and so is its value.
The gap runs wider than the grant programs. FSC accepts construction and demolition debris as reclaimed wood material but does not classify salvaged urban trees as reclaimed. So the same exclusion that shows up in the funding language shows up in the certification architecture. That is what tells you this is structural rather than an oversight by any one agency.
Tens of thousands of local jobs go unrealized every year for want of the recognition, naming, support, and funding the volume and value justify. The definition already exists. Adopting it requires no new program and no new spending.
What to do
Before September 14, while they are home. Contact your own senators. Ask that the Wood Innovations and Community Wood provisions name urban, salvaged, and reclaimed wood as eligible feedstocks and as a priority. Ask that the Section 8101 Forest Inventory and Analysis update count the urban resource.
Add one more line. If the bill is willing to support 40 megawatt wood energy systems, it should give the durable product pathways for the same material equal standing in the program language.
Add the measurement ask. The Section 8102 Blue Ribbon Panel should include urban and salvaged wood in its review of what Forest Inventory and Analysis measures, and the Section 8254 data tracker should carry urban wood as its own category. Both are about counting rather than funding, which makes them the cheapest thing on this list for a staffer to say yes to.
Ask for the economic assessment. The Forest Service has measured this resource for decades and has never measured the industry. A directed economic assessment of the urban and salvaged wood value chain, covering capacity, employment, and value added, would give every future application a federal number to point at. It is a study, not a program, which makes it the easiest yes in this brief.
Call your state forester. Ask what it would take to name urban and salvaged wood in the next revision of your state’s Forest Action Plan. That conversation does not wait on Congress.
And bring your own numbers. Committee staff discount general advocacy. If your community has a plan, a yard, a shop, a contract clause, or a tonnage figure, put it in one short paragraph and send it with every message. A local program with numbers attached carries further than any argument in this brief.
Note: Section references are to the Agricultural Act of 2026 text the Senate Agriculture Committee considered on August 6, 2026, following release of updated legislative text on July 31. The measure has not been reported out of committee and is not enacted law. Section numbers and program details can change in negotiation, so confirm the current text before citing them.
Sources: Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry; USDA Forest Service reorganization announcements and senior executive organizational chart, August 31, 2026; Sustainable Urban Forests Coalition policy update, week of August 31, 2026; Urban Salvaged and Reclaimed Woods, North American Standard, Version 1, December 2021; NextCycle Michigan 2025 Michigan Gap Analysis; Nowak, Greenfield and Ash 2019. Full citations available on request.
Action Sheet
Industry Brief #5
September 2, 2026
Pick a message, send it as written or change it to fit your voice. Every version carries the same request, so it lands whichever one you choose.
Key dates
The Senate returns September 14. Members are home until then.
The current farm bill extension expires September 30.
Send it now even if you think the bill is headed for another extension. The text people negotiate from in December is the text that exists when they sit down.
Where to send it
Your own senators and representative. Constituent messages carry the most weight. senate.gov/senators and house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative
Senate Agriculture Committee, (202) 224-2035. The committee directs callers to majority and minority staff and gives out staff contact information through this line. It is the only route the committee itself endorses for getting text in front of a drafter.
Committee web form: agriculture.senate.gov/contact. Chair John Boozman and Ranking Member Amy Klobuchar have their own contact pages.
Your state forester, for the Forest Action Plan ask. No bill has to pass first.
The asks
Name urban and salvaged wood as eligible feedstocks and a priority in the Wood Innovations and Community Wood provisions.
Have the Section 8101 Forest Inventory and Analysis update count urban and salvaged wood as part of the national resource, and extend the timber products output survey to processors handling it.
Include urban and salvaged wood in the Section 8102 Blue Ribbon Panel review scope, and make sure people who process this material are part of it.
Carry urban and salvaged wood as a distinct resource category in the Section 8254 Forest and Wood Products Data Tracker.
Direct an economic assessment of the urban and salvaged wood value chain, covering processing capacity, employment, and value added.
If the bill supports 40 megawatt wood energy systems, give the durable product pathways for the same material equal standing in the program language.
Name urban and salvaged wood in the scope of the national biochar research network.
The volume and value justify recognition, naming, support, and funding.
Message 1. Name it
Please name urban, salvaged wood as eligible feedstocks and a priority in the Wood Innovations and Community Wood provisions of Title VIII, and have the Section 8101 Forest Inventory and Analysis update count the resource.
Communities remove millions of trees every year for storms, disease, development, and public safety. That wood can become lumber, pallets, panels, and biochar. Federal programs struggle to or decline to support it because federal program language does not name it. This costs nothing, adds no new program, and asks only that existing programs recognize wood the country already produces.
Message 2. Count it
Federal programs cannot fund what they do not measure. Forest Inventory and Analysis counts timber on forest land. It does not count the wood that comes out of cities and towns, so no community can point to a federal figure when it applies for equipment money or approaches a lender.
Please have the Section 8101 update include urban and salvaged wood in the national resource, include it in the Section 8102 Blue Ribbon Panel review scope, and carry it as its own category in the Section 8254 data tracker. All three are about counting rather than funding, which makes them inexpensive to say yes to.
Message 3. Stop burning it all
The draft would allow federal support for wood energy systems as large as 40 megawatts. Federal programs already provide a clear path for turning urban and salvaged wood into energy. There is no equivalent path for lumber, biocomposites, other durable products, or biochar made from the same material.
Please give the durable product pathways equal standing in the program language. Otherwise the bill widens the one door that was already the widest.
Message 4. Measure it; the industry, not just the trees
The Forest Service has measured this resource for decades and has never measured the industry that uses it. There is no federal figure for finished value, employment, wages, avoided municipal disposal cost, or tax return.
Please direct an economic assessment of the urban and salvaged wood value chain, covering processing capacity, employment, and value added. It is a study, not a program. It commits no money and creates no eligibility, and it would give every future application a federal number to point at.
And bring your own numbers
Committee staff discount general advocacy. If your community has a plan, a yard, a shop, a contract clause, or a tonnage figure, put it in one short paragraph and send it with every message. A local program with numbers attached carries further than any argument in the brief. If you have personal experiences or relationships, include them and how it impacts you and your community.
The volume and value justify recognition, naming, support, and funding.
Data Sheet
The Provisions, the Figures, and the Sources
September 2, 2026
Reference companion to Industry Brief #5. Section references are to the Agricultural Act of 2026 text the Senate Agriculture Committee considered on August 6, 2026. The measure has not been reported out of committee and is not enacted law.
Calendar
Date | Event |
July 31, 2026 | Updated legislative text released. |
August 6, 2026 | Senate Agriculture Committee failed to advance the bill. Committee recessed rather than adjourned. |
August 31, 2026 | Forest Service announced remaining senior executive assignments in its reorganization. |
September 14, 2026 | Senate returns. |
September 30, 2026 | Current farm bill extension expires. |
Fall 2026 | Forest Service leadership transitions, after fire activity subsides. |
Provisions and asks
Section | What it does | What would change | Our ask |
8101 | Rewrites the Forest Inventory and Analysis strategic plan; calls for timber products output and woodland owner surveys. | Sets what the national wood census measures for the next decade. | Include urban and salvaged wood in the national resource; extend the products output survey to processors handling it. |
8102 | Creates a Blue Ribbon Panel to review the Forest Inventory and Analysis program. | A body convened to recommend what the inventory should measure next. | Name urban and salvaged wood in the review scope; include people who process the material. |
8254 | Requires a public Forest and Wood Products Data Tracker on carbon impacts. | Becomes the federal reference point for buyers, specifiers, and carbon markets. | Carry urban and salvaged wood as a distinct resource category. |
8251 | Wood Innovations Grant Program. | Applicant match cut in half; sawmill retrofit priority revisited. | Name urban, salvaged, and reclaimed wood as eligible feedstocks and a priority. |
8252 | Community Wood Grant Program. | Federal share 35 to 50 percent; up to $5 million per grant; authorized through 2031; wood energy systems up to 40 megawatts. | Name the material; give durable product pathways equal standing with wood energy. |
8231 | State Forest Action Plans. | More funding and more state spending flexibility. | Name urban and salvaged wood in state plan revisions. |
7309 | National biochar research network. | New federal research program for biochar. | Name urban and salvaged wood in the network scope. |
Not in bill | Economic assessment of the value chain. | No federal figure exists for finished value, employment, wages, avoided disposal, or tax return. | Direct an assessment covering processing capacity, employment, and value added. |
Current law compared with the draft
Item | Current law | Draft |
Wood Innovations match | Dollar for dollar, non-federal | Cut in half |
Wood Innovations award cap | $300,000; $500,000 exceptional; $1,000,000 only for stationary wood energy above 5 MW thermal | Unchanged in the summary |
Community Wood federal share | 35 percent of capital cost; 50 percent in special circumstances | 50 percent generally |
Community Wood grant cap | $1,000,000; $1,500,000 special consideration | Up to $5,000,000 |
Community Wood authorization | Existing authorization | $50 million through 2031 |
Wood energy system size | Existing limits | Up to 40 megawatts |
Sawmill retrofit priority | Limited to counties with unemployment above the national average | Revisited |
FY2026 federal wood grant awards
Program | Awarded | Projects |
Wood Products Infrastructure Assistance | $57 million | 41 |
Wood Innovations | $31 million | 113 |
Community Wood | $17 million | 23 |
Package total | $105.5 million | 177 across 44 states |
Urban and community forestry grant category, 2026 | $1 million | 5 expected |
2026 Wood Innovations awards naming urban or salvaged wood as feedstock | None | 0 of 111 published |
Figures used in the brief
Figure | Value | Source |
Annual merchantable urban wood removals | About 7 billion board feet | 1 |
Annual value as chips | $89 million | 1 |
Annual value as logs | $786 million | 1 |
Realistically recoverable as lumber | 3 to 4 billion board feet | 1 |
Finished lumber value | $7.5 to $15 billion | Derived, see note |
Michigan annual merchantable urban tree wood | About 1.7 million fresh-weight metric tonnes | 1 |
Michigan tree material in state waste reporting | About 55,000 short tons | 2 |
Biochar methodologies with Core Carbon Principles approval | 3 | 3 |
Forest Service state director positions filled | Most still vacant | 4 |
State office staffing | 6 to 8, liaison roles | 5 |
Derivation note: the $7.5 to $15 billion finished lumber figure is an Urban Ashes calculation, not a Forest Service figure. It applies hardwood lumber market prices to the share of annual volume Forest Service research treats as realistically recoverable. The $89 million to $786 million range is raw material valued at roundwood rates and includes no manufacturing value.
Sources
Nowak, D.J., Greenfield, E.J., Ash, R.M. 2019. Annual biomass loss and potential value of urban tree waste in the United States. Urban Forestry and Urban Greening 46: 126469.
NextCycle Michigan, 2025 Michigan Gap Analysis, commissioned by Michigan EGLE.
Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market, Core Carbon Principles approved biochar methodologies, August 2025. Isometric Biochar Production and Storage v1.0, Verra VM0044 v1.2, Climate Action Reserve U.S. and Canada Biochar v1.0.
USDA Forest Service senior executive organizational chart, August 31, 2026.
USDA Forest Service reorganization announcements and public statements by the Chief, 2026.
Also cited: Urban Salvaged and Reclaimed Woods, North American Standard, Version 1, December 2021; Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry section-by-section summary, July 31, 2026; Sustainable Urban Forests Coalition policy update, week of August 31, 2026.
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