Melforts Co-op Feeds facility is located on the corner of Hamilton Ave. and Broadway Ave. It is set to close on August 15. (Alice McFarlane/northeastNOW Staff)

By Mat Barrett

Co-op Feeds

Co-op Feeds consolidating feed production; closing Melfort facility

May 13, 2019 | 5:29 PM

Federated Co-operative Limited (FCL) has made an announcement that will affect feed production in the prairies.

On Monday, May 13, FCL announced that Co-op Feeds will be moving from six facilities for feed production to three. The announcement comes as FCL consolidates its production. Associate Vice President of Agriculture and Home with FCL, Patrick Bergermann said some of the reasoning came from consolidation on both the producer side and manufacturing side.

“They’ve got a lot of age to those facilities, and they were going to require a lot of capital investment in them,” Bergermann said. “So we needed to look at what was going to be sustainable.”

FCL feed plants manufacture cattle, horse, sheep and poultry feed in bags and bulk orders.

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Facilities in Melfort and Brandon, Manitoba are closing permanently in August and October respectively, while the facility in Edmonton will move to Wetaskiwin. A total of 10 jobs each are affected at the Melfort and Brandon facilities, but Bergermann said they hope those jobs aren’t completely lost.

“Certainly we are going to be working with our human resource teams to do our best to transition as many of those employees into opportunities in the Co-operative retailing system as best we can,” Bergermann told northeastNOW.

Bergermann added even though the facility in Melfort is closing, that is not an indictment on the work of the employees that are currently there.

“We’ve got a wonderful team of people there in Melfort and by no means does today’s announcement speak at all to the quality of their work,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of great people there that have been doing a good job in serving local producers for a long time.”

As for the producers in the region who have relied on Melfort’s facility, Bergerman said they should worry about what’s next. He said that they are going to the best they can by making available packaged feed across the western provinces, and where possible, bulk feed through their facilities.

The three facilities that will be running feed production are in Saskatoon, Moosomin, and Calgary.

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mat.barrett@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @matbarrett6