The trees, dude

This is very cool:

The folks at GreenWood Resources are working on poplar hybrids that will boost volume and wood quality even more. Its experimental station here has 53 commercial elite-hybrid varieties.

“This marries traditional agriculture to forestry,” says Brian Stanton, GreenWood’s plant geneticist, who quickly notes there’s nothing Dr. Frankenstein about this. It’s easy to see why. Believing GreenWood was doing genetic engineering, eco-terrorists bombed its facilities in 2001. In fact, the company uses traditional cross-breeding. It just does so at a state-of-the-art level.

Of course, there’s nothing new about poplar farms. They were originally developed as a bio-mass source for energy production. When that didn’t work out, poplar was used for wood chips and paper production, but there’s little money in that today. GreenWood’s goal: create fast-growing, high-quality hybrid poplars for furniture stock, veneer, paneling and cabinetry.