Hamrick Engineering announced that it has successfully and economically extracted arabinogalactan and taxifolin from larch (tamarack) woodchips and has been granted patents for this technique in the countries with the most larch trees: the U.S., Canada and Russia.

Hamrick Engineering pointed out that arabinogalactan and taxifolin have been shown to have significant probiotic effects in both people and animals and can aid in producing animal feed without antibiotics that can be labeled as "organic."

Ed Hamrick, president of Hamrick Engineering, said, “We’re very excited about these excellent test results after many years of working on this technology. We’ve developed these technologies in Minneapolis, Minn., and we’ve been consulting with a research institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, who have many years of experience working with arabinogalactan and taxifolin. Our aim is to find partners in some of the large pulp and paper mills in Russia and Canada. These mills have access to millions of tons per year of larch wood and have the infrastructure in place for harvesting, chipping and pulping this wood. Our technology is a simple, low cost add on to existing pulp and paper mills.”

Larch woodchips are much more valuable for making pulp and paper if the arabinogalactan and taxifolin are removed first, but this is difficult to do, and few pulp and paper mills will currently accept larch (tamarack), the company explained, noting that after extraction of the arabinogalactan and taxifolin, the paper produced from these chips is much stronger and more valuable than the paper produced without this extraction.

Additionally, the arabinogalactan and taxifolin have additional uses, are very valuable and have been approved worldwide for human consumption and as a component of animal feed, Hamrick Engineering said.

Hamrick Engineering was founded in 2013 as a research and development company. Other technologies are for producing sugars and ethanol from sugar beets, sugarcane, sweet sorghum, softwood woodchips and straw. There are four families of CelloFuel patents that have been granted in the U.S. and around the world, including the European Union, Canada, Russia, China and Brazil.