MINIMAL IMPACT, MAXIMUM RETURN || In California, Sierra Pacific Industries’ foresters, biologists, and botanists conduct inventories of forest growth, wildlife populations and habitat, native plants, and other forest attributes on 10 percent of the company’s 400,000 inventory plots each year.
The roots of SIERRA PACIFIC INDUSTRIES (SPI) go back to 1949 when Curly Emmerson and his son Red went into business together, leasing a small sawmill and forming a partnership. Seventy years later, Red and his family are still in the forest products business — as the largest private US timberland owner and one of the largest US lumber manufacturers. In 2019, Sierra Pacific acquired over 126,000 acres of California forestland from Fruit Growers Supply Company. Other notable endeavors in 2019 include rebuilding a California sawmill, producing renewable biomass power from seven cogeneration electricity facilities in two states, installing 30 acres of solar panels to help power SPI’s windows and millwork plants in Red Bluff, California, and working to secure federal approval of a Habitat Conservation Plan on their California forestlands for the northern and California spotted owls.
