A southwestern Ontario grain elevator that’s been used to handle corn for feed milling will be under new management starting Oct. 1.
Great Lakes Grain, the joint grain marketing arm ag retailers Growmark and Agris Co-operative, has signed an agreement to operate the elevator at Thamesford, about 30 km east of London.
The two million-bushel capacity elevator was previously operated by Nutreco Canada’s feed milling arm, Shur-Gain. Financial terms of the new agreement weren’t disclosed.
“With expected good yields and lower prices, we expect our customers will hold ownership longer and storage capacity is going to be at a premium this year,” Don Kabbes, market development manager for Great Lakes Grain, said in a release Friday.
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As the harvest in southern Alberta presses on, a broker said that is one of the factors pulling feed prices lower in the region. Darcy Haley, vice-president of Ag Value Brokers in Lethbridge, added that lower cattle numbers in feedlots, plentiful amounts of grass for cattle to graze and a lacklustre export market also weighed on feed prices.
“As harvest equipment continues to get larger and concerns about poor stalk quality quicken the harvest, this will help speed up delivery for our farmer-owners.”
The Thamesford facility will be open 24 hours a day to receive crops during harvest, Great Lakes Grain said. The elevator includes three receiving lines and has unloading capacity of 17,000 bushels an hour, plus two grain dryers able to handle 120,000 bushels a day.
“The design and construction of this elevator is unique in Ontario and the base structure was built to last,” Chatham farmer Stan Gillier, a director with Agris and the chairman of the co-op’s property committee, said in the same release.
Chatham-based Great Lakes Grain is already billed as one of the largest operators of country elevators in Ontario, in which it manages almost 20 million bushels (about 510,000 tonnes) of crop storage capacity. — AGCanada.com Network
