THURSDAY, JUNE 16, 2011
VOL. 89 | NO. 24 | $3.75
FRESH HONEY |
SERVING WESTERN CANADIAN FARM FAMILIES SINCE 1923
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HOTEL’S NOVEL APPROACH
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WWW.PRODUCER.COM
PULSES | MERGER
FARMLAND | MAKING ACRES
Pulse merger creates new player
New pioneers clear the way Huge demand for land | Land agreement serves up 136,000 new acres for farmers
Legumex Walker will vie with Alliance Grain Traders for top spot in pulse industry
BY MARY MACARTHUR CAMROSE BUREAU
BY SEAN PRATT
LA CRETE, Alta. — Alberta’s oldest farming communities are about to become its newest farming area with the opening up of 850 quarter sections of land for agriculture. A land swap agreement with the provincial government will result in the sale of 136,000 acres of land for agricultural purposes in Mackenzie County near High Level, Fort Vermilion and La Crete over the next few years. This spring, 266 quarters of bushcovered land near La Crete sold for $15,725 to $125,000 per quarter. It’s estimated the land sales will increase the county’s arable acres by 30 percent from 500,000 to 636,000 acres. “There is a huge demand for land,” said Dicky Driedger, chair of Mackenzie County’s government land sale committee.
SASKATOON NEWSROOM
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SEE LA CRETE DEAL, PAGE 3
JUNE 16, 2011 Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: Box 2500, Saskatoon, SK. S7K 2C4
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SEE MERGER, PAGE 2
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John Bergen of La Crete, Alta., uses a root picker to do custom land clearing on newly cleared land. The machine pushes the roots into windrows where another machine picks up the long rows of roots. Bergen hoped to be done soon to allow the land to be seeded this spring. | MARY MACARTHUR PHOTO
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Two family-owned icons of the western Canadian pulse processing sector have merged to become one of the biggest pulse processors in the country. Roy Legumex Group of Companies of St. Jean Baptiste, Man., and Walker Seeds Ltd. of Tisdale, Sask., have united to form Legumex Walker Inc., a pulse and special crops processor and merchandiser with nine plants in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The new entity filed a preliminary prospectus with security regulators last week for an initial public share offering that is expected to raise $70 million. Company officials declined comment because of legal concerns surrounding the prospectus, but many details of the new business were unveiled in the document. Legumex Walker intends to invest $42.1 million of the share offering proceeds in construction of a $109.6 million canola processing plant to be built in Warden, Washington. The company would own 85 percent of Pacific Coast Canola, a plant that would produce 142,500 tonnes of oil and 227,000 tonnes of meal annually. The facility would give Legumex Walker a three percent share of North America’s canola crushing industry. The company would have a 1,600 to 2,200 kilometre advantage to its competitors when shipping to food processors on the West Coast or to ports servicing the Pacific Rim.