The grain company formerly known as CWB has picked sites and plans to start construction next month on two new grain elevators in Saskatchewan.

G3 Canada on Tuesday announced it will build primary elevators about five km north of Melville on Highway 10 and seven km west of Saskatoon on Highway 14, to be ready for the 2018 harvest.

The new elevators, which will have 34,000 tonnes and 42,000 tonnes of storage capacity respectively, will both be built on Canadian National Railway (CN) lines with 134-car loop tracks and high-capacity drags under their drivesheds, “enabling trucks to unload quickly.”

The sites are expected to give Winnipeg-based G3 “excellent rail access to its Thunder Bay and St. Lawrence River terminals, and to G3 Terminal Vancouver once it becomes operational in 2020.”

“Growing our origination footprint in Saskatchewan is the next step in G3’s plans to build a highly competitive coast-to-coast grain handling network,” G3 CEO Karl Gerrand said in the company’s release.

The Melville site will be G3’s easternmost facility in the province, sited on CN’s Yorkton subdivision just north of its junction with CN’s main line at Melville.

The Saskatoon elevator will be on CN’s Watrous subdivision, which also connects at Melville with the railway’s eastbound Rivers subdivision running into Manitoba.

G3, a joint venture between Bunge and Saudi Arabian ag investment firm SALIC, has owned the former Canadian Wheat Board and its grain handling assets since 2015. –– AGCanada.com Network