VISCOUNT, Sask. – While his neighbors were sitting frustrated on top of piles of grain waiting for the Canadian Wheat Board to find buyers in a wheat-flooded world market, Sidney Gibb could clear out a bin, jump in his truck and make a delivery to a customer almost in his backyard.
“The quotas were small so we couldn’t deliver to the elevator,” said Gibb, a Viscount farmer who was an original shareholder in the Pound-Maker feedlot in Lanigan. “We knew the feedlot would take it.”
The small feedlot that Gibb started delivering to in the early 1970s has been replaced by a vastly expanded feedlot Pound-Maker has established because of its ethanol plant. Where 4,000 cattle per year used to be fed, 24,000 now get fattened.
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Gibb found the early feedlot a good market for barley, but since the ethanol plant was set up in 1991, local wheat producers have found a 3,000 bushel per day market just down the road.
“It certainly stabilizes my operation,” said Ron Morningstar.
With Pound-Maker only 22 kilometres from his farm, moving wheat isn’t as difficult as it is for farmers dealing with tight quotas, he said.
And the plant is especially useful for producers trying to get rid of frost-damaged wheat.
The feedlot gives Morningstar the chance to custom feed his cattle and refine his herd. For others, it provides a job.
“I have a son that brings in bales,” said Gibb. “He hauls bales for whole months from the district around here.”
The Pound-Maker operation has affected producer Dale Blair’s cropping decisions.
“It’s enabled us to use more cereals in our rotation and add CPS wheat,” said the chair of Pound-Maker investments. “We don’t have to worry so much about finding a market anymore.”
It is a good combination for farmers – a feedlot and an ethanol plant both in need of large volumes of grain.
The feedlot and ethanol plant are critical to each other.
The key is the protein and fibre mash left behind as the wheat goes through the ethanol-making process. The mash is fed to the cattle.
Plant officials say the mash is not a byproduct, but a co-product because it has value equal to the primary product – ethanol.
