STE. AGATHE, Man. Ñ Farmers have heard for years that the Ste. Agathe canola plant is going to reopen, but on a recent spring day as dozens of trucks rumbled up to the plant to dump loads of canola, it seemed to have come true.
Manager Warren Andrews said the reactivated plant will be chewing up canola much faster once it is broken in.
“We’re just completing fine tuning,” said Andrews about the plant, which was purchased by a group of Toronto-area investors.
“We’ve come a long way.”
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The Ste. Agathe plant has a troubled history. It was built by a company that went bankrupt while the plant was being broken in and it never ran at full capacity. The plant sat idle for years as debtors and investors haggled over the company’s carcass.
In late 2004, Associated Proteins Inc. announced it had bought the plant and would put it into production.
It’s not just another canola crushing plant. The Ste. Agathe facility uses no solvents in processing. That means the oil produced there can be sold into specialty markets.
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For specialty canola producers such as Canterra Seeds’ chief executive officer Dave Sippell, the reopening is great news.
“It’s a very different product and there’s great demand for it in the marketplace,” said Sippell, whose company is contracting a variety of canola with high oil content that will be crushed at Ste. Agathe this autumn.
“Because of this plant, Canada can participate in that market in volume.”
There are other solvent-free crushers in Canada, but Sippell said they are not large enough to produce the commercial quantities of oil needed to supply the U.S. market.
For now, the plant is running at half-capacity, four days a week, Andrews said. But soon the company hopes to crush 1,000 tonnes a day.
And by mid-summer the plant should be refining the canola oil. The plant now only crushes the canola and ships out unrefined oil and canola meal.
Andrews said the company is designing a refining system and is ordering equipment that it hopes to have operating in July. Then the oil will be shipped directly to food processors.
“It’ll go all over North America,” he said.
