Artel Farms owner Grant Dyck has been creatively laying the groundwork to entice innovative, large-scale business to the region. As a presenter at this fall’s Grain World conference in Winnipeg, Dyck challenged the big guns of agribusiness to take a serious look at Niverville for a grain-processing facility coupled with a railway loop.
“We saw the need for a commercial or industrial scale business to come to town,” Dyck says. “We are right beside one of the last suitable sites in Manitoba for a loop or shuttle track connecting to a railway that lies within 160 kilometres of the U.S. border. The amount of investment that could come in to build something like this is so substantial. It would offset the commercial to residential tax base of Niverville significantly. That’s the big selling feature to this and we have a site procured that would support a rail loop outside of the flood zone. For a line company, a soybean-crushing plant, or a grain-handling facility, Niverville is situated ideally for such a venture.”
Dyck presented concept drawings at the conference to accompany his proposal. His recommendation is to build the plant and rail loop on 200 to 300 acres of land that he currently farms bordering the CP Rail track on the northwest corner of Niverville. He says that he shouldn’t have been surprised by the interest that his presentation garnered since the ag industry is always looking for new sites next to the railway.
Many of our grain products are shipped for export to the U.S. as well as the West Coast, headed for Europe and China. Even today, transport by rail is the most cost-effective way to do that. So any grain-processing company understands the need to be strategically located next to a railway.
“Ironically, that’s what put Niverville on the map,” says Dyck. “We have a rail line running through. So what’s the initiative to bring a big business to the community? Well, we have an ideally situated location that’s out of the flood zone.”
According to Dyck, municipalities on the west side of the Red River have been extremely successful in staging sites for grain-handling facilities. Currently, five out of the seven big companies are located there. As a result, the CN rail line has become overly congested while the CP rail line on the east side, running through Niverville, is underutilized.
Even so, there are only small-scale soybean-crushing facilities in Manitoba. While the Red River valley produces most of the province’s soybean crop, much of it is transported to the nearest crushing plant in Ontario or the U.S. Oftentimes it’s transported right back again to farmers in the valley that use a derivative of the soybean plant for hog feed.
According to Dyck, the area just east of Niverville is home to the highest hog production per capita anywhere in North America. Having a processing facility on this side of the river just makes good sense and answers some of the concerns about environmental sustainability.
In any industry, efficiency is paramount to success, which is why Dyck’s proposal to provide enough land to build a 7,200-foot railway loop is crucial to such a sale. The old standard for loading grain onto railcars meant pulling the cars off the main track and into cramped siding areas, unhooking the cars, waiting while they were loaded, and then rehooking them and moving on. This process could take days.
But the U.S. set a new, highly efficient standard that is taking off in Canada too. Building high-speed loops means the entire train can circle around and off the main track and get loaded in under 24 hours. Rail loops like this can already be found in Glenlea and Ste. Agathe and it’s the only way grain-processing plants will even consider building new facilities.
“From procurement of the land to the build, I think the full turn-out time is under two years,” Dyck says. “It goes remarkably quick.”
He says that a large-scale soybean-crushing facility in Niverville, such as the one he’s pursuing, would mean a $250 million investment into the community. The jobs it would create close to home would also serve to bolster the local economy.
The industry that purchases the land would build the facility as well as the loop, working along with CP Rail, who would create access to the loop. Dyck already has two commercial ag businesses interested in his property.
But Dyck’s dream doesn’t stop there. The completion of such an enterprise would only be enhanced by creating a heavy truck corridor around Niverville to allow farmers with large equipment and freight trucks access to the processing plant without disrupting vehicular traffic at some of the busiest intersections in Niverville.
To do this, he’s already had conversations with Manitoba Infrastructure and Transportation on a proposal to build a perimeter heavy-truck route from the 311 highway, north along Sood Road and east along Stott Road. Trucks would merge back onto the 311 on the east side of town on Sixth Avenue North, which means they would also have better access to the business park without having to travel along the town’s Main Street.
“It takes a bit of vision,” Dyck admits. “I can see the dots. Now it’s just figuring out how to connect them. There’s been a genuine interest and it’s a win on so many fronts. The fact that already we’re at the level where the town, CP Rail, the province, and interested parties are seeing its merit and discussing it is so amazing.”
As for how a large endeavour like this would affect residential developments and the new high school, Dyck is confident that the distance between them would be substantial enough to mitigate any concerns. Additional measures can be taken, such as a soil berm and fencing, to create safety and noise barriers so that the facility would become a moot issue.
As well, the entire proposal, as it moves forward, would require a public hearing at which point residents could weigh in with any concerns they may have.
“We’ve got an extremely progressive council and we’ve got a town that’s an anomaly with its location,” says Dyck. “Back in the 70s, we had a 75 percent commercial to 25 percent residential tax [ratio]. We were a little hub. Unfortunately, that’s been imbalanced to the tune of roughly 80 to 20 percent, residential to commercial. Bringing in an industrial type of business changes us from being a place to sleep to a place where we can live.”
