A Winnipeg firm better known for handling Prairie farmers’ producer-car grain shipments is entering the grain handling business itself.
Mission Terminal Inc. (MTI), which operates a terminal at Thunder Bay, Ont., has bought a 6,000-tonne-capacity primary grain elevator at Alexander, Man., about 25 km west of Brandon.
The company, owned by Winnipeg-based Upper Lakes Grain Group, is also involved in the grain business east of Thunder Bay and in the U.S., but the parent firm’s CEO expects MTI will become more involved in the Prairie grain sector.
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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.
“We look at (the Alexander elevator) as a start into that side of the business. Producer cars will still be our primary goal, but farmers have said to us they are looking for us to do a bit more for them,” Adrian Measner told the Manitoba Co-operator in its July 31 issue. “We see this as complementing what we’re doing.”
The southwestern Manitoba elevator will handle Canadian Wheat Board crops and non-board crops, for which the company recently hired a grain marketer, Measner told the Co-operator’s Allan Dawson.
Upper Lakes Grain Group, whose companies source and ship crops and industrial products, bought a former Saskatchewan Wheat Pool terminal in Thunder Bay in 1999 to form MTI. Ideally, Measner said, the company would like its own terminal in Vancouver, although it has no near-term plans to acquire one.
The official opening of MTI’s Alexander elevator takes place at noon July 31, the Co-operator said.
