The story of Durafibre Inc. makes no mention of a road paved with gold.
Instead, the story’s characters find themselves on a journey where there are plenty of turns and the occasional pothole.
Among the group are some Canora, Sask., farmers who dared a decade ago to dream of starting a value-added venture.
The farmers, who already grew plenty of flax, set out to form a flax straw procurement company. They planned to gather the straw and then sell it to a company already in the business of processing the straw’s fibre.
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But the first chapter of the story does not have a happy ending.
The processing company didn’t want to buy straw from the farmer-owned co-operative. That left the farmers with a lot of straw and no market for it.
“Fortunately, they wouldn’t give up,” said Barb Isman, general manager of Durafibre, while speaking at a Brandon conference last week about value-added processing.
“They decided that if Kimberly Clark didn’t want the straw, they’d figure out how to process it themselves.”
And so began chapter two in the story about a group of farmers who dared to dream.
They knew their dream, which now included straw procurement and processing, would require money – big money.
Realizing they would need a partner, they set out to find someone with deeper pockets than their own. They knocked on a couple of business doors and found that Cargill Ltd., one of the world’s largest agricultural corporations, was willing to join them.
Durafibre Inc. was formed from the new partnership and another chapter was about to be written.
The challenge was to find a way to process the flax straw. Markets for the processed fibre also were elusive.
The Prairie Agricultural Machinery Institute was enlisted for technical support, and work began in earnest to develop processing equipment. Durafibre wanted a material that could be sold into the automotive and pulp and paper industries. By 1996, with the help of PAMI, equipment was built that could get the fibrous material to 60 percent purity. But the blend of 60 percent bast fibre and 40 percent shives wasn’t good enough for prospective buyers.
“We could make it really fast, but we couldn’t sell it to anyone,” Isman told her audience last week.
Durafibre discovered in 1998 that it would need to get the bast fibre to 98 percent purity to tap the markets it was looking for.
More equipment was built, and the Saskatchewan Agri Food Equity Fund joined the farmers and Cargill as an equity partner.
Last summer, almost a decade after the farmers dared to dream, the upgraded processing plant was cranked into production.
The venture had reached a new turn in the road, but it was not yet out of the woods.
“What happened was bolts and belts flew everywhere,” recalled Isman, who spoke with candor last week about the many hard lessons learned.
The processing plant was plagued by downtime throughout the summer.
Then the flax harvest arrived, bringing with it another source of aggravation. Much of the crop was green and tough as it was fed through the combines. Farmers were still harvesting flax in late November.
The farmers and Durafibre, already used to hitting bumps in the road, pressed on.
“The harvest was a real challenge, but we got it in and we’re moving product out the door (of the plant),” Isman said.
Durafibre bought 14,000 tonnes of flax straw last year. The company expects to buy 30,000 tonnes in 2000.
Isman said the venture will be able to sell all the bast fibre produced from that tonnage. Buyers have been found in Canada, the United States, Mexico, South America and Europe.
Markets are also being developed for products refined from the shives, the woody core of the flax plant’s stem.
The plant employees 23 people full time. Isman believes one day there will be room for more plants like it in Western Canada.
