by aleida, on March 17th, 2010
Two-hundred years ago, about 80% of the U.S. population lived and worked on farms. Today, that same percentage of the population lives in cities. The urbanization process left a large number of farmhouses, barns, and other rural structures abandoned to the elements, and for at least the last four decades, there has been a concerted effort to reclaim the materials abandoned long ago for use in new structures. Currently, the positive impact of this reclamation is easily discernible – the preservation of live trees, diversion of waste from the landfill, etc. – but those who initially bought milled products made out of reclaimed barn wood didn’t do it for sustainability’s sake. Michael Black, founder and owner of the San Rafael, CA-based company Black’s Farmwood, found this out the hard way. His original green pitch was a bust, but when he learned to focus on the beauty of the material, he found he could infiltrate projects and guide them towards sustainable materials.
Michael came to the business of reclaiming wood rather accidentally. In the mid-90s, he was a psycho-biology major at UC Santa Cruz. He describes his career opportunities as being “in the field of prescribing drugs.” In his senior year, a particularly inspirational humanistic psychology class made him switch to a clinical psychology major, where he could explore human potential and the collective unconscious. Upon graduation, he turned down a job at a Santa Cruz biotech company, and instead sought organic personal development by traveling abroad. “I knew I didn’t want to be tied down in a lab,” he says. Once back in the U.S., jobless and with a thin pocketbook, he went to work as a carpenter for one of his friend’s father, a contractor working on a large private residence project in Marin County, CA. To further his education, Michael enrolled in a Ph.D. program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he planned to study the same philosophical vein that he had first explored in college.
One day, while speaking to his grandmother back on the family’s Ohio tobacco farm, she informed him that the farm’s 150-year-old antique oak tobacco barn had been blown down in a storm. Asked what she planned to do with it, she replied she would have the wood burned, and the site cleaned up. “I thought, ‘What a waste to do that!,” says Michael. The impending fate of the fallen structure connected a dot for Michael, who for a while now had been seeing a lot of wood waste piling up at the job site, in a dumpster, headed for the landfill. “I saw beautiful pieces being trashed. Intuitively, I knew that was not right. So I thought I should try to recycle the barn.”
Michael convinced a high school friend to send him a small piece of the fallen barn. The man whose residence Michael was working on at the time saw the wood and wanted it for his house. “That’s how things fell into place,” Michael recounts. With travel expenses paid for, Michael went to his farm to get the wood for that proejct. Working with just crowbars and saws, it took Michael and that high school friend a couple of weeks to completely dismantle the barn, package it up, and ship it back to Marin County.
With laughter in his voice, he admits they didn’t quite know what they were doing. “I thought this was a one-time deal. I was going to take the proceeds and put it towards my education.” But word got out, and fast. The client told his friends about the wood, the architect told people, and soon Michael was receiving calls from strangers asking him for product for their own projects. “After I had so many calls and so many inquires, I just couldn’t ignore the call to adventure. I was in school and I knew I enjoyed my studies – but this was real life. That’s why I say Black’s Farmwood chose me; I didn’t choose it.” After withdrawing from school altogether, Michael went back to Ohio and set up camp on the family property. With the help of his two grandfathers, he started taking down their neighbor’s old farms and making large stacks of boards at his camp. He used the nascent power of the Internet and, little by little, established connections with people on both coasts. After about four months, he had enough inventory to return to California and establish an actual business. Black’s Farmwood was founded on January 1, 1999.
It wasn’t a full operation at first, and even though he started the company as a way to pursue environmental principles, that foundation didn’t help him much. “I definitely was not making it in the environmental community. I would get a lot of positive feedback, but never got any purchase orders.” And the green message didn’t get him anywhere with established architecture and design firms, yet they would prove pivotal in the company’s growth. “It wasn’t until I embraced the design community that it really started to take off,” says Michael. Designers and their clients, working on Tuscan villas, French farmhouses, or Spanish mission style homes, started gravitating toward the reclaimed wood because it was rustic and beautiful, not because of any environmentally positive attributes that it might offer. “For me, that was fine, because I knew that we weren’t cutting down new trees,” Michael says. “I didn’t need to force the sustainability message on people. I focused on what they wanted, but I didn’t have to compromise my values.”
In the last decade, however, he has seen the public’s awareness make leaps and bounds towards environmental understanding. “To my satisfaction, people are still interested in the beauty and story of the reclaimed wood, but there is so much more of a consciousness regarding the environment and global climate change,” says Michael. The number of purveyors of reclaimed barn board has exploded, and with that comes the reality that at some point there will be no more barns to deconstruct and reclaim. Michael does not know when that point will be reached, but he does say that business opportunities don’t end with farm buildings. He has taken the initiative to provide greater value, variety, and accountability for his products. He has a strategic relationship with another Bay Area company to reclaim urban logs and mill them into flooring, so that for any Bay Area clients, the carbon footprint of their finished product is amazingly minuscule. Years ago he started selling FSC certified wood, and on January 18, 2010 he obtained his FSC Chain of Custody certification.
The increased national demand, and growing international use of reclaimed and sustainably harvested wood has also led him to team up with his aunt and uncle and establish a second company, Farmwood International. From an office in Manhattan, Farmwood International focuses on customers east of the Mississippi and over the Atlantic. With his business established, Michael now spends a lot of his time consulting for companies, helping them to connect the dots on increased efforts toward sustainability.
We’re eager to see what new areas his businesses explore. Thank you, Michael, for your time during out sit-down!
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Thanks for posting this inspirational story. My father used to do some of this wood reclaiming back in the 70s, and he still has some old walnut boards that he hasn’t built anything with, but can’t bear to part with! Re-using wood is just common sense, and it’s great to see someone actually making a living doing it.
Check out a similar concept from Northern Virginia, called “neighbor wood” – a play on “neighborhood” – it’s based around the idea of harvesting lumber from suburban trees:
http://www.neighborwood.net
http://members.verizon.net/~vzentcoe/neighbor-wood/
I don’t know the Neighbor Wood folks, but found their site through a friend of a friend. Sounds like they should connect with Michael Black!