The saga of the strawboard plant in Elie, Man., and its fairy-tale like proposal of turning straw into gold, is finally coming to a close.
Efforts to find a buyer for the whole operation were unsuccessful, said Mimi Long, a spokesperson for Dow Chemical Canada, the plant’s owner.
“During the course of our efforts, Dow met with over 20 interested purchasers, none of whom it turned out had the ability to purchase the plant and machinery, which was priced very competitively, nor the investment funds to operate the plant and consume the straw,” she said.
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For this reason, the company has decided to sell off the ill-fated operation piecemeal. It hopes to liquidate the money-losing plant by year’s end.
The strawboard press and other key machinery were sold in late November and are to be removed sometime in January, she said.
“Right now, we’re working on the issue of the straw with Manitoba Conservation,” said Long, adding that there are roughly 150,000 bales that need to be removed from the site.
“Following that, we will be marketing the building and the premises.”
Perhaps best known to travellers to and from Winnipeg, for its giant piles of straw bales alongside Highway 1, the idea for the plant was first hatched in 1996 by Isobord Enterprises.
Its plant was running in 1998, with support from the provincial government for its job creation and value adding potential, as well as the promise of offering farmers a new market for their straw, for which it paid $10 a tonne.
Plagued by financial and technical problems, the plant closed its doors for the first time in 2001.
That same year, it was bought by Dow Chemical Canada, which renamed it Dow BioProducts, and kept it running at a loss until December 2005.
Bill Ridgeway is president of the Straw Producers Co-operative, a group of area farmers who had been contracted to supply wheat straw to the plant. He said that after it closed the second time, the members had agreed to put their organization on hold until the fate of the plant became clear.
Burning the massive piles of straw so close to the highway is an unlikely option, he said, as would be the possibility of spreading and discing it into the soil because the heavy twine holding the large square bales together would tangle in machinery.
“A lot of it is very old straw left over from when Isobord was running it before Dow,” he said. “I doubt if it would even burn. It might smolder for a long time.”
The additional market channel for straw will be missed. Unlike flax straw, for which good markets still exist, Ridgeway said farmers generally sell excess wheat straw cheaply to their livestock-producing neighbours, but market demand is limited.
“There are people talking about using straw for ethanol or paper or all kinds of things, but nothing has come to fruition.”
Ridgeway said the co-op had submitted a business plan a few years ago to Manitoba Conservation seeking funding support for a proposal to get rid of the straw bales by composting.
Using a technique common on mushroom farms, the plan was to break it down rapidly by turning the piles over frequently and adding lots of water.
“It only takes about six weeks or two months. You get a lot of internal heat which breaks it down,” he said.
“At that time the province wasn’t interested because there was no value-added at the end of the process.”
