Winnipeg grain and agrifood firm Parrish and Heimbecker is set to reinforce its recent arrival in the east-central Alberta retail market with a new grain elevator.
Privately-held P+H announced Tuesday it will build a new 46,000-tonne capacity grain elevator and crop input centre at Viking, about 120 km southeast of Edmonton.
The Viking site will tie into Canadian National Railway (CN) track with a 150-car loop track, and will also include a 25,000-tonne dry bulk fertilizer shed and chemical storage facility.
P+H, which broke ground at the new site earlier this month, expects to create 20 new jobs locally and “expand new inputs and grain merchandising opportunities for area farmers,” company president John Heimbecker said in a release.
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A company spokesperson said the Viking facility is expected to be completed in early 2019.
P+H said it expects the Viking site to expand grain marketing services and to provide support for the four crop input retail facilities it bought in the region early this year.
Those facilities — at Sedgewick, Wainwright, St. Paul and Marwayne — came to P+H through a divestiture ordered by the federal Competition Bureau as a condition of approval for Agrium’s Crop Production Services (CPS) arm to buy Andrukow Group Solutions, an independent crop retail chain.
CPS had owned the Marwayne and St. Paul stores while the Sedgewick and Wainwright stores were part of the Andrukow chain. Viking is in the middle of the same 200-km-diameter area between Edmonton and Lloydminster as the four facilities.
Agrium’s consent agreement with the Competition Bureau blocks CPS from buying any similar ag retail and/or fertilizer assets in the Andrukow chain’s catchment area for three years — and from buying back the four divested sites for 10 years.
Heimbecker said the company “expect(s) the economic spinoffs from the local construction crews to be significant to the Viking area over the next two years.” — AGCanada.com Network
