CALGARY — When grain condominiums went up for sale at Falher and Camrose, most sold out the first day.
Alberta Wheat Pool is offering storage space in its two newest concrete elevators. Demand was so high at the Falher facility near Smoky River that building plans for 10,000-tonne capacity had to be increased to 15,000 tonnes.
At Camrose, 15,000 tonnes of space is available with most of it being spoken for or sold already. Each unit equals 4,000 bushels said an announcement from the pool.
High volume facility
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Construction just started on the two elevators with openings scheduled for May 1995. These are high-throughput, high-volume elevators with 12,000-tonne capacity at Falher and 15,000 tonnes at the Camrose facility, above the condo storage. Both will have a 52-car spot on two tracks with provisions in Camrose for a third track, said Trish Jordan of the pool.
Grain cleaning available
Grain cleaning will be offered at these inland terminal elevators as well, stemming from recent labor problems on the West Coast that delayed shipments overseas. By sending clean grain the pool hopes to speed up operations. Right now, grain shipped west is cleaned at the terminals before being loaded.
“There’s a lot of pressure in the industry and everybody is trying to think of everything they can possibly do to make it (grain transportation) work better and this is just one option for us,” said Jordan.
“It’s a tradeoff. We’ve got a lot of money invested in the west coast terminals and we’ve got very good equipment that we’ve invested a lot of money in to allow us to do the cleaning on a large-scale basis. It’s like a backup.”
