Industry Brief #4.1 • Naming Is Funding • Who Was Named
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Naming Is Funding - Who Was Named
Industry Brief #4.1
August 14, 2026
The Forest Service announced $105.5 million in federal wood grants across 177 projects in 44 states. We read the published awards for one thing: which materials and feedstocks get named. The answer shows where urban and salvaged wood sits in the federal funding system. Part Two looks at the language behind it and what can still change.
Where the money went
Three programs split the $105.5 million package.
• Wood Products Infrastructure Assistance: $57 million across 41 projects. The program funds facilities processing byproducts of ecosystem restoration near federal or Indian lands.
• Wood Innovations: $31 million across 113 projects, generally capped at $300,000, with higher limits for exceptional market impact and qualifying wood energy systems.
• Community Wood: $17 million across 23 projects, supporting capital investment in community wood energy and innovative wood product facilities.
What the awards bought
Of the 111 Wood Innovations awards available in the published list, sawmill and lumber work received 46 awards totaling $12.5 million. Mass timber received 22 awards totaling $5.9 million. Wood energy received 15 awards totaling $5.3 million. Biochar received three awards totaling $1.1 million.
The two $1 million awards went to wood energy systems: Dupont Pine Products in Georgia and Riverside Forest Products in Washington. Wood Innovations generally caps awards at $300,000, with $500,000 available for significant market impact. Qualifying stationary wood energy systems above 5 megawatts thermal output can receive up to $1 million.
Who got named
All 111 published Wood Innovations awards that identify feedstock use forest-land language: national forests, hazardous fuels, mill residuals, small-diameter timber, or low-value forest biomass.
Across the prior four award years, Texas Urban Sawmill stands out as a project that directly names urban material: $200,000 in 2024 for a circular economy project.
The 2023 Angel City Lumber award makes the point another way. The Los Angeles urban wood mill received $81,000 for the “Angeles National Forest x Angel City Lumber VG Flooring Project.” An urban mill qualified around national forest logs.
Cambium Carbon has also won Wood Innovations awards tied to forest species projects: European larch in 2025 and eastern white pine in 2026. Urban wood businesses can compete. The funded language shows which feedstocks the program currently rewards.
The equipment can be the same. The feedstock named in the application changes the fit.
What the law names & what the announcement names
The Wood Innovations statute focuses on advancing innovative wood products. The Community Wood statute includes facilities using low-value, low-quality wood, as determined by the Secretary.
The funding announcement narrows the emphasis to hazardous fuels and wood residues from the National Forest System and other U.S. forest lands. Its first priority is markets for wood and biomass generated by forest health and hazardous fuels reduction projects.
The difference matters, and it is fixable in two places. Congress can name urban, salvaged, and reclaimed wood in statute. The Forest Service can also name it directly in future funding announcements.
An industry consensus definition and chain of custody standard for this material has existed since 2021 via the USRW Standards & Certification and already ties to the certification frameworks these programs recognize, so naming it in a funding announcement requires no new definitional work.
What these grants buy
Wood Innovations is built around stationary equipment and project development. Stationary sawmill, wood products, and qualifying wood energy equipment can fit. Larger capital requests can move to Community Wood, which can support facility capital costs.
For city-scale urban wood systems, the practical issue is fit. Portable mills (even though most of the time they are not moved), site work, operating labor, and feedstock purchases sit outside the core Wood Innovations equipment pathway, even though those costs are often central to getting a local recovery system running.
Innovation in the Innovation program means market expansion for forest products, not novel technology. Fifty-six percent of it is buying sawmill equipment. Conventional capacity and equipment took 60 projects and $17.5 million, 56 percent of the money. Sawmill upgrades, lumber drying, production expansion, wood energy systems. Nothing in those descriptions is new technology.
What the material is worth by product
The Forest Service Urban Wood Workbook shows a wide value ladder per ton: log slabs $1,554, firewood $350, pellets $245, pallets $134, high-quality chips $100, compost $50, low-quality chips $40, log seconds $33.30, and log thirds $1.00.
No dimensional lumber, no graded hardwood, no flooring, no millwork, no furniture components. It goes from log slabs at $1,554 a ton directly to firewood at $350. Every durable product between those two is absent and that is where the vast majority of the value lies
The same workbook puts live-edge slabs at roughly four and a half times the revenue of firewood, with firewood around ten times the value of log seconds. No middle.
Nowak, Greenfield and Ash valued national urban wood potential at $105 per thousand board feet using 2018 New York stumpage and the International quarter-inch rule. That was a useful way to establish national scale. It is a weak reference price for material that typically enters the market after removal and delivery.
That distinction matters when the number moves from research into funding decisions. Delivered log values can be several times stumpage, depending on species, grade, location, and market.
The recovery cascade is straightforward. Merchantable stems go first to solid wood products. Lower grades can move into industrial lumber, pallets, blocking, dunnage, crating, panels, and composites. Bark, tops, brush, and fines can move to biochar, mulch, or energy. This is the middle between the trending out slabs and firewood.
Higher-value, longer-lived uses should get the first look. Energy takes the material those uses leave behind.
Cities and mills can improve the data now by publishing actual log and lumber sale prices. Every real transaction gives the industry a better reference point.
The one program that names us
The Forest Service’s 2026 National Urban and Community Forestry Challenge Cost Share program uses “community tree resource utilization” as this year’s category. It specifically names wood from pruning, removals, storms, pests, and disease, and identifies lumber, slabs, furniture, flooring, biochar, and other products.
Total funding is $1 million, with five awards expected. The program sits under Assistance Listing 10.675, Urban and Community Forestry.
The agency already has the language. The next step is carrying that same recognition into the larger wood utilization programs.
Forest Service research puts annual U.S. urban tree log potential at about 7.2 billion board feet, with roughly three to four billion board feet of realistic lumber potential after accounting for size, rot, and form. The funding scale should begin to reflect the resource scale.
What to do
Ask to be named. Ask the Forest Service to explicitly name urban, salvaged, and reclaimed wood as eligible feedstock in the next Wood Innovations and Community Wood announcements, including merchantable urban stems for durable wood products.
Get in before the next notice is written
The FY26 round posted in February, so the FY27 priorities are being drafted this fall. The program office writes that notice, but the priorities it writes to come down from Executive Orders on domestic timber production and wildfire, by way of USDA. Aim accordingly.
Congress is the call that reaches them. Ask your appropriations delegation (see below) to include report language directing the Forest Service to name urban and salvaged wood among Wood Innovations priorities. Report language sets agency direction without amending statute, and the agency follows it.
Frame the ask as domestic supply. The current priorities exist to expand American wood production. Urban and salvaged wood is domestic supply that needs no new harvest, no federal land access, and no imports. That argument fits the frame already in place instead of fighting it.
Call your Regional Wood Innovations Coordinator (see below) for the timelines and the windows to get your calls into congress. Coordinators advise applicants and sit in the first review gate. They do not write the priorities, so do not pester or hamper them with those asks. Ask when FY27 is drafted, what direction it is taking, and why urban projects do not score today. Take that and your voice to your delegation.
Put the eligibility question to the national program office in writing. Does urban and salvaged wood satisfy the low-value, low-quality wood clause in the Community Wood statute.
Who to contact, by what they can actually do
Change the priorities. Your own senators and representative, and the Interior, Environment and Related Agencies subcommittees of both Appropriations committees. Rosters at appropriations.senate.gov and appropriations.house.gov. Find your delegation at senate.gov/senators and house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative. A constituent of a subcommittee member carries the most weight here.
Change the statute
Who to contact
Senate Agriculture Committee: (202) 224-2035, and agriculture.senate.gov/contact
House Agriculture majority: agriculture.house.gov
House Agriculture minority: democrats-agriculture.house.gov
The Asks
Name urban, salvaged, and reclaimed wood as eligible feedstocks and a priority in Sections 8251 and 8252, the Wood Innovations and Community Wood Facilities programs.
Have the Section 8101 Forest Inventory and Analysis update count urban and salvaged wood as part of the national measured wood resource.
Include urban and salvaged wood in the Section 8102 Blue Ribbon Panel's review of what Forest Inventory and Analysis measures and carry it as a distinct resource category in the Section 8254 Forest and Wood Products Data Tracker.
Know the calendar and how projects score – Not the folks to ask for the change
Regional Wood Innovations Coordinators, by email.
Region | States | Coordinator | |
1 Northern | MT, ND, northern ID, northwestern SD | Julie Kies | |
2 Rocky Mountain | CO, KS, NE, SD, WY | Todd Gardiner | |
3 Southwestern | AZ, NM | Grace Sorenson | |
4 Intermountain | southern ID, NV, UT, western WY | Chris Clark | |
5 Pacific Southwest | CA, HI, Guam, Pacific Islands | Jim DiPasquale | |
6 Pacific Northwest | OR, WA | Adrian Kiser | |
8 Southern | AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, OK, SC, TN, TX, VA, PR, VI | Marcus Taylor | |
9 Eastern | CT, DE, DC, IL, IN, IA, ME, MD, MA, MI, MN, MO, NH, NJ, NY, OH, PA, RI, VT, WV, WI | Lew McCreery | |
10 Alaska | AK | Priscilla Morris | priscilla.morris@usda.gov, 907-743-9467 |
Bring your own numbers. If your community has an urban and salvaged wood plan, yard, mill, biochar facility, manufacturing, contract clause, ordinance, board-foot volume, or actual sale price, put it in one short paragraph and send it with every message. Real local numbers make the case.
Part Two covers the farm bill language, what the Senate draft would change, and the asks still open after the August 6 committee vote.
Note: Award figures are drawn from USDA Forest Service Wood Innovations Program funded proposal lists and the August 2026 announcement. The published list available for review contained 111 of the 113 reported Wood Innovations awards. The $105 per thousand board feet valuation and 7.2 billion board foot figure are from Nowak, Greenfield and Ash 2019; the three to four billion board foot lumber range comes from that paper’s discussion of usable logs. Confirm current program details before citing them.
Sources: USDA Forest Service Wood Innovations Program grant lists and FY26 notices of funding opportunity; grants.gov opportunity USDA-FS-UCF-01-2026; The Urban Wood Workbook (NRS-INF-37-20); Nowak, Greenfield and Ash 2019, Urban Forestry & Urban Greening 46: 126469; Kentucky delivered log price survey, first quarter 2026; 7 U.S.C. 7655d and 7 U.S.C. 8113. Full citations available on request.
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