It never ceases to surprise me the entrepreneurial spirit of rural Saskatchewan to try to develop new economies.
On a recent trip to the Norquay/Pelly area that reality came into focus once more, as I came upon the construction of a new peat moss facility 小蓝视频 built near Norquay.
Just a bit farther east sits the remnants of the alfalfa pelleting plant. The facility is still in use, by the looks of it as grain storage, but gone are the days of processing alfalfa into pellets for the livestock feed sector.
The juxtaposition of a new processing plant 小蓝视频 constructed in the virtual shadow of one which no longer functions as anticipated was not lost on me.
There have, through the years, been a large number of economic development plants pop up across the Canadian Prairies, with a rather wide-range of hits and misses among them.
The little excursion I was on actually illustrated the situation quite well.
Just outside Yorkton, as I headed north is Grain Millers, an oat processor in the midst of a major expansion. They are now part of a large international company, but its Yorkton roots are in the entrepreneurial vision of a local man who began oat processing here. You can mark the overall effort as about as successful as you might hope for when building a processing plant.
North on Highway #9 and I passed the corner where I could have turned west to find what began as a processing plant for the waste farm product; flax straw.
The flax straw plant was one which seemed a natural fit, using a renewable fibre source that was generally 小蓝视频 burned, to create a variety of products. There was provincial and corporate dollars involved, but it never got to the next level, and after a number of years, closed.
The aforementioned alfalfa plant is interesting in the sense there was a time, back in the 1970-80s when the industry of dehydrating alfalfa into a useable pellet was a very successful industry. Plants popped up all over the place. There were, for example, two plans in tiny Zenon Park in northeast Saskatchewan, some 10-miles away one in Arborfield and only slightly further away in the opposite direction one in Tisdale.
Successful for a number of years, the sector died off one-by-one.
While the highway was under a detour, it had been the plan to return to Yorkton through Kamsack, where sits a plant that was built to turn cereal straw into a product which would compete with chip board. Another idea with seeming merit, but
it never really got much traction.
There have been lots of ideas, many progressing to the point of production, but sadly most have ultimately failed.
But the peat plant shows the entrepreneurial spirit remains as they hope to be one of the winners.
Calvin Daniels is Editor with Yorkton This Week.
