Alberta grain handler Providence Grain Solutions has boosted its capacity in the province’s northeast, while Canada’s third-largest handler further adjusts its Alberta space.
Cargill Ltd. said Thursday it has sold the smaller of its two grain elevators at Viking, Alta. to Providence, which also already operates a steel bin-based handling site in the community, about 115 km east of Edmonton.
Providence, for an undisclosed sum, gets Cargill’s Viking “B” concrete elevator, sited on CN track off Highway 14, with a handling capacity of 4,650 tonnes and loading space for 60 rail cars.
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The smaller Cargill elevator is also next door to Providence’s own 7,850-tonne capacity site, which sports a 28-car rail spot.
Cargill will keep its Viking West elevator, about half a mile north at the junction of Hwys. 36 and 14, which has capacity for 13,640 tonnes.
Cargill bought the larger elevator from Agricore United (now part of Viterra) in 2007; Agricore had doubled that elevator’s capacity in 2000.
The Viking B elevator, meanwhile, “will complement Providence’s existing presence in Viking as well as regionally,” Cargill said in a release.
Providence, a producer-owned firm based at Fort Saskatchewan, Alta., had recently lost 4,400 tonnes of its elevator capacity elsewhere in Alberta’s northeast.
Its wooden-crib elevator at Waskatenau, about 160 km northwest of Viking, burned down in April and the company says it’s considering its options for rebuilding there.
Cargill Ltd., the Winnipeg-based Canadian wing of the U.S. agrifood giant, recently announced it would shut a small “outdated” concrete elevator and ag input site at Albright, Alta., west of Grande Prairie, by July 31.
But Cargill more recently also announced it will expand its southern Alberta presence by buying a 35,300-tonne high-throughput Viterra elevator at Carseland, east of Calgary. That deal is expected to close by Aug. 23.
