Current decortication methods provide natural fiber in a tangled mess with significant damage to the individual fibers. FibreWerks has team invented a patent pending decortication process that mimics the manual peeling of bark, in ribbon form, from the woody inner core (hurd, shive) of a bast fiber plant stalk. Our early stage process invention presents a radical departure from the current decortication approaches that sacrifice fiber quality for high throughput, as it produces hitherto unrealizable, high-quality, undamaged fibers in ribbon form for high-value biocomposite applications. The new process feeds rows of cut, unretted, and dried stalks downward through a set of rubber-coated pinch rollers to crush and flatten the stalk, and then into a stationary knife wedge to split the crushed stalk in half. A second set of pinch rollers (with larger diameter bottom roller) diverts the half stalk sideways thereby breaking the tip of the hurd/shive stem and starting the bark-peeling process. A symmetrical set of rollers repeats this step for the other stalk half. The wedge rapidly descends out of the way so that the peeled hurd/shive stem moves downward unhindered to be ground up below. The bark with undamaged fiber exits on both sides of the machine, where it can either be left as a continuous ribbon or cut to customer-defined lengths, e.g., via an oscillating serrated blade or rotating cutter.