A doubling of capacity at an Ontario flour mill is good news for prairie wheat growers, says a Canadian Wheat Board official.
The Dover Flour mill in Acton, Ont., is slated to open a new milling unit this fall, increasing its daily capacity to 8,000 from 3,600 100-pound bags.
Dover Flour is owned by P & H Milling, a division of Parrish and Heimbecker.
The expansion is designed to replace capacity that was lost when fire destroyed a company mill at Hayhoe, Ont., in June 2008.
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Jim Thompson, the wheat board’s manager of North American sales, said the expansion is welcome news for the board and farmers.
“It’s replacing, but it’s also new in the sense that it had been out for more than a year and we weren’t sure it was going to come back on-line,” he said.
The additional capacity at Acton represents the equivalent of 265 tonnes of wheat a day, or 80,000 tonnes a year.
“That’s two Panamax vessels of wheat you don’t have to sell overseas.”
While the capacity lost at Hayhoe was used to process soft white wheat from Ontario, Thompson said the expansion will also translate into more capacity for spring wheat from Western Canada.
P & H Milling bought Dover Flour and its five processing facilities in February 2009, but is keeping the familiar Dover name.
Dover has been in business since 1807, when a gristmill opened on the banks of the Speed River in what is now Cambridge, Ont.
P & H owns seven mills and is the second biggest miller in Canada, with 26 percent of the market. Number one is Archer Daniels Midland, with 41 percent, while Horizon Milling GP (formerly Robin Hood) is third at 14 percent.
P & H Milling president Howard Rowley was on vacation last week and not available for comment.
