A 200-million dollar demand for canola seed?

Farm and Ranch September 23, 2011  There is not a lot of canola currently being produced in the Pacific Northwest but that hasn’t prevented a subsidiary of Legumex Walker Inc. of Canada from breaking ground this week for a canola oilseed crushing plant in Warden, Washington.

It will be capable of processing 11-hundred metric tons of canola seed a day.

Joel Horn is president and CEO of the subsidiary Pacific Coast Canola.

Horn: “I think one of the reasons that there isn‘t much grown today is because there isn‘t a local buyer like us. We could purchase as much as 200-million dollars of canola a year once we are up and running. In other parts of North America this has happened where the canola crusher is built. Take North Dakota. There was very little canola grown until that canola crusher was built and then the local acreage went up to a million acres.”

Horn says Warden is a great location.

Horn: “First of all there is a local farming community in the Pacific Northwest that can access this site quite easily. We have great transportation infrastructure here and then also the site is surrounded by dairy farms that can use the canola meal and then there are a lot of canola oil buyers nearby. So it really becomes farmers growing the canola crop and we turn it into products that are then bought by their neighbors.”

The 109 million dollar facility could be operational in late 2012 or early 2013.

I’m Bob Hoff and that’s the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on Northwest Aginfo Net.

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