Lethbridge’s new, 268,000 square foot facility is more than just a place to hold popular agricultural events, say its developers. It’s a platform to show southern Alberta’s agriculture sector to the world and grow the local economy in the process.
In that sense, the Agri-food Hub and Trade Centre, which opens to the public Aug. 10, marks a return to the Lethbridge and District Exhibition’s roots, said the CEO of the 126-year-old ag society.
“This organization has always been about bringing the world together to showcase agriculture,” said Mike Warkentin.
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“This facility is a throwback to those original roots of bringing the world together to celebrate agriculture and showcasing the natural advantages and the advantages that we built for ourselves here in southern Alberta.”
Construction of the trade, convention and ag centre, which replaces three of Exhibition Park’s pavilions, began in March 2021 on the Exhibition grounds at the east side of the city.
The $80 million project was enabled through a combination of federal, provincial and municipal funding as well as partnerships with companies such as MNP, which received naming rights to the meeting centre and one of four meeting suites.
“It’s a good opportunity for driving investment and opportunity for local farmers, an opportunity for the world to understand the importance of the local southern Alberta producer and how far the products they produce actually reach into the world,” said Warkentin.
The unique makeup of southern Alberta’s agricultural sector will make the Hub an ideal destination for commodity meetings and other industry events, said Warkentin, particularly commodities with a large presence in southern Alberta that lack facilities elsewhere to hold national meetings.
“Southern Alberta plays a large component in a lot of different commodities and a lot of processing — obviously in commercial cattle production, corn production and potato production. There’s a significant component of the national ecosystem of all those commodity crops that come out of southern Alberta,” he said.
“(The Hub is) that connection point to attract those events that traditionally don’t have agriculture-centric markets to hold their events and conventions.”
One highlight of the facility is its 104,000 square feet of exhibition space, which Warkentin said will be a perfect fit for Ag Expo, an agricultural and equipment show held every spring.
“It’s specifically capable of holding any element of agricultural equipment that is transportable on a provincial highway today,” he said. “You’ll really see an impact (of that) on our existing signature events and how we grow those.”
Speaking specifically of Ag Expo, Warkentin said the sheer size of the exhibition area will make the event more competitive with other popular western Canadian farm shows such as Canadian Western Agribition, Canada’s Farm Show (both held in Regina) and Red Deer’s Agritrade Equipment Expo.
“It provides us an opportunity to greatly expand the demographics coming to the show just because the centre is so much larger,” he said.
Expanded demographics are important to the goals of the Exhibition, which envisions the Agri-food Hub as an incubator to spur more than $90 to $100 million in economic activity in the region every year.
“What that means is more people are going to be coming to this market, which means there will ultimately be overall growth — not just the money that people come in and spend, but ideally growing the population, growing the tax base, driving new dollars into the southern Alberta economy that do not exist today,” said Warkentin.
The hub will also be home to 13,000 square feet of convention space as well as 5,000 square feet divided into four meeting suites.
“Those are really amenity spaces that didn’t exist here before,” said Warkentin.
In addition to three salon rooms and pre-function lobbies, the Hub will feature banquet halls where locally sourced “farm to table” cuisine will be served.
“We created some gala space which didn’t exist in our urban park before, very specifically to elevate event experience and our hosting opportunity here in southern Alberta,” he said.
The Hub’s original budget rang in at around $71 million: just under $28 million from the Alberta government, $25 million from the City of Lethbridge and just shy of $18 million from a loan taken on by the Exhibition.
A March 16 Global News story reported the overall budget had grown to just under $80 million due to rising costs.
