After nearly a decade of minimal interest and nominal acres, two entrepreneurs in northwestern Manitoba are planning to revive the province’s buckwheat industry.
Don and Ben Fyk, who farm near Garland, Man., are planning to build a $15 million buckwheat processing plant in the area, which will need 30,000 to 50,000 acres to supply the facility.
Don Fyk will be president of the new company, called Fyk Soba Inc.
“We’re a long ways down the road here into what we’re doing. We want to turn the ground sometimes in July,” Fyk said in the third week of June.
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“We’ve got a lot of things in place. We’ve got our engineering, our architectural and our permits.”
Fyk and his partners in the enterprise, which includes North American and offshore investors, are already having an impact on buckwheat production in Manitoba’s Parkland region.
The company contracted buckwheat acres this spring to get growers interested in the crop and provide a supply of it when the plant is operational.
“Our acres are probably up by 300 percent,” said Albert Dohan, who has a seed cleaning business near Ethelbert, Man., and is partnering with the Fyks on the buckwheat plant.
“I would say we’re (at) 8,000 to 10,000 (acres) … in the Parkland area, compared to maybe 2,000 last year,” Dohan said.
“There hasn’t been a big player in the business, and we’re trying to rejuvenate that and develop markets.”
Rod Fisher, who runs Fisher Seeds in Dauphin, Man., said Fyk Soba has been contracting buckwheat at about $13 per bushel.
Fyk said the company’s production contracts are slightly higher than $13.
Acreage is still tiny compared to other crops, but a gain of 6,000 to 8,000 acres represents a massive increase for buckwheat in the Parkland region.
Manitoba buckwheat acres have been stagnant to non-existent for the last decade, typically ranging from 4,000 to 7,000 across the entire province.
That’s down significantly from the late 1970s to early 1980s, when buckwheat was a sizable crop in the province.
“In years past, Manitoba has grown 180,000 acres,” Fyk said.
“Manitoba and Canada had always supplied Japan with 80 percent of their requirements for buckwheat.”
Acres plummeted when China took over the Japanese market and Viterra stopped buying buckwheat in Manitoba.
As well, Manitoba’s soybean boom over the last 15 years has stolen acres from alternative crops such as flax and buckwheat.
Fyk said the products from the proposed plant, including buckwheat flour and bran, will be sold into the North American market.
“Right now I’m contracted with an American company that will be taking full production next year and so on,” he said.
“This company that I’ve been dealing with has been around for hundreds of years.”
The goal is to certify buckwheat as “gluten free” so that the company can tap into the sizeable market for wheat alternatives.
“Buckwheat is a gluten-free product,” Fyk said.
“This (gluten free) is going to be the niche product and niche requirement in the (food) industry.”
Dohan said growers in the Parkland region are interested in alternative crops such as buckwheat because canola has lost some of its lustre.
“Canola is really expensive to grow and the margins are really thin,” he said.
The input costs for buckwheat are a fraction of canola, he added.
“With buckwheat … an average crop will make you a lot of coin.”
Fyk, who is likely the largest buckwheat producer in Canada, said he was tired of exporting unprocessed buckwheat and wanted to take action to remedy the situation.
He said it makes more sense to process buckwheat in Canada’s primary growing region rather than shipping raw product thousands of kilometres.
“Instead of spending all this money on freight and sending to be processed someplace else, why don’t we build it here and make it work here,” he said.
“It’s a good industry. It doesn’t cost a lot of money to grow,” he said. “We don’t have to take a second mortgage on our property for input costs.”
Fyk said the only remaining roadblock is financial. They have investors in place but need to more financing before they officially move forward on the project.
