Citing increasing urban congestion, Cargill plans to permanently close its aging Calgary grain elevator, its biggest primary terminal on the Prairies, by the end of January.
“Because of the terminal’s urban location, accessibility was becoming increasingly more challenging for our farm customers,” Mike Morlock, the Mountainview farm service group manager for Cargill AgHorizons, said in a release.
The closure will affect seven unionized staff, who will get access to career transition and support, Cargill said.
Cargill’s Canadian head office in Winnipeg hasn’t yet decided what will happen to the buildings and land once the site on 15th St. Southeast is decommissioned, Morlock said in an interview.
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That process alone is expected to take “probably the better part of a year,” as the company clears out stored grain this winter and then moves out its own equipment, he said.
Served by both CN and CP track, the Calgary terminal has a handling capacity of 65,320 tonnes.
The federal government started construction on the concrete facility in 1913 as an inland grain terminal, Morlock said, and Cargill bought the terminal as is from the provincial government in 1991.
A city that’s now home to 1.07 million people has grown up around the near-centenarian terminal, found across from a municipal sewage treatment plant in the Bonnybrook industrial area.
Farmers now must haul grain through downtown core-area levels of traffic to get to the facility, Morlock said.
Cargill said its terminal’s farmer customers will now be served at its nearby elevators at Blackie, about 60 km southeast of the city; Carseland, about 55 km east; and Equity, about 130 km northeast.
