WILKIE, Sask. – Jim Skinner got fed up sitting in a lineup at the local
elevator every August, so he decided to do something about it.
He and other farmers in northwestern Saskatchewan built their own
terminal in the nearby town of Unity.
It was the beginning of a process that led to two other businesses and
plans for a third in the nine years since Skinner’s initial annoyance.
“We figured we had to do it ourselves,” he said, because the large
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grain companies weren’t listening to their concerns about timely
hauling.
The North West Terminal Ltd. project came about after Skinner called a
meeting in the fall of 1993 that drew almost 400 people. Residents were
ready to complain, but raising money for the terminal was more
difficult. However the group met the deadline and raised $2.3 million
from investors within a 100 kilometre radius.
The terminal was built and opened in 1996 without a speck of government
money, Skinner said. It became the first of several projects in which
people in this area have invested.
Next up was the West Central Pelleting plant.
Jim’s wife, Margaret, who chairs the pelleting plant’s board, said the
idea came out of a discussion in their living room on what to do with
the screenings collected at the North West terminal. Sometimes farmers
took the weeds and chaff cleaned from their grain and fed it to their
cattle. Sometimes the company sold the screenings to Alberta feedlots.
Other times the screenings were thrown away.
The Skinners saw an opportunity to add value to a local product. They
and a group of like-minded neighbours hired Vern Racz to come to 15
public meetings.
Racz, director of the Western Feed Resource Centre at the University of
Saskatchewan and a believer in adding value when it makes business
sense, said it was difficult to change grain producers’ minds away from
their traditional ways until they were convinced it would benefit them.
West Central was able to raise the necessary $780,000 in share capital.
Early successes are leading others to plan similar ventures. West
Central is raising $1.1 million to open a second pelleting plant in
Wolseley, Sask., in southeastern Saskatchewan. A group in Kelliher,
Sask., is also
planning a facility.
Margaret Skinner said Wilkie was the province’s first community-owned
pelleting plant, although similar plants opened shortly after in
Weyburn and
Central Butte.
“Any community group can do a project by finding the people who are the
experts and finding them early,” she said.
The group also hired Randy Single from Manitoba, who had experience
with pelleting plants.
“We sent the plans to Randy and he phoned back and said, ‘don’t do a
thing until I get there,’ ” Jim Skinner said.
Construction started within three months of Single’s arrival in Wilkie,
and the first pellets were produced in June 1998, a year after he
arrived.
Racz said Margaret has said that in the pelleting plant’s first 18
months of operation, it brought $33 million in economic value to the
area in freight cost savings and livestock production.
With the ideas hopping around Wilkie, the town’s truck-sized
grasshopper mascot appears an appropriate choice. Wally Lorenz, mayor
of Wilkie since 1994, said that Hoppy, like many of the investment
ideas, wasn’t always popular. First the statue was seen
as a wry comment on the area’s agriculture, but it has now been moved
to an area that will become a park. Lorenz said the grasshopper is a
symbol of the town’s rejuvenation and survivability.
Lorenz was one of the pelleting plant’s top promoters and is now
selling residents on the latest investment opportunity – a spa. The
plan is to truck water from Aroma Lake to pools in a spa to be built on
the east side of town. An analysis of Aroma Lake shows it has twice the
dissolved minerals of the Manitou Lake spa southeast of Saskatoon.
The project must raise $3 million by February 2003, but two-thirds must
be raised by the end of August. Lorenz said the total now stands at
more than $1 million and if the first deadline is not reached, spa
promoters will ask the provincial securities commission for an
extension.
He said the successes of the terminal and pelleting plant have made it
easier to raise investment money for the spa. However, the project is
not “pure Wilkie.” It, like the other projects, will depend upon a
wider area, not only for investment, but for people for the 50-60 jobs
the spa would create.
“That generates $2 million in payroll. That’s new money, tourism
money,” Lorenz said.
While he gets an occasional ribbing from fellow mayors about his town’s
success record, Lorenz points out that this has only happened because
it is regional development.
“You have those old hockey wars. I’ve lived it and experienced it
playing hockey. It’s part of the culture,” he said. “You talk about it
and laugh about it. But for survival, you have to come together.”
Although the province has promoted regional development for a number of
years, Jim Skinner is skeptical of business ventures that include
government presence. He and others say it takes a committed and trusted
group of local people who live and breathe the idea to sell it to their
neighbours.
Lorenz said the spa project grew out of a group of six individuals,
rather than from a provincial tourism committee.
And Margaret Skinner jokes that if left to regional economic
development efforts, Wilkie would have been pinning its future business
hopes on drawing tourists for bungee jumping from the elevator.
However, Racz doesn’t discount the impact of government help to get a
sustainable project going. He said he couldn’t have helped sell the
community on the idea of a pelleting plant without a grant from the
federal-provincial Agrifood Innovation Fund.
“If they had to spend for my true time and effort, they couldn’t have
afforded me.”
