b"Westlock Seed Cleaning Co-op Board Chair Colin Felstad is one of the seed growers who sells his seed at the plant. Selling his seed at the plant allows him to focus on growing the seed and not have to hire staff to work in his yard during the spring when farmers are picking up seed.It works well. I think we have 22 seed growers that work out of the Westlock Plant. And I suspect many of them would be like me, if you had to do it all off your own farm, we probably wouldn't. So it's a good opportunity for local seed growers, he says in a phone interview.Theres pedigreed and farm saved seed cleaning services offered at the plant, along with commercial seed treating. The plant acts as a drop off point to send seed samples to SGS Canada for testing. They do have the capability to do grain separations, but due to how busy they are cleaning seed theyre unable to which is one of the reasons they started looking at building a new plant. The current plant has to be run(L-R) Westlock Seed Cleaning Co-op employees Austin Houle, Chad Benson, Coleton Peterson, Wayne 24 hours a day from the last week ofWalker, Jackie Huppertz, Mackenzie Walker, Neil Greenfield, and Randy Musterer. October until the end of April to fulfillPHOTO: WESTLOCK SEED CLEANING CO-OPthe seed cleaning demand. Westlock Seed Cleaning Co-op has cleaned justbeen no decisions made yet about what under two million bushels of seed perwill happen to the current plant when year for the past three years. Five yearsthe new plant opens.ago the co-op completed a strategic planConstruction on the new plant broke laying out their goal for the next 15 years.ground last fall and is expected to be Felstad says the boards sentiment wasdone in the fall of 2024. Financing for itHopefully, its that they wanted to keep growing theis being done through a loan with Farm plant and its business.Credit Canada. The existing plant isa generational We have pretty much built out thiscapable of cleaning 500 bushels of seedproject, hopefully plant as much as we can without aper hour, with the new plants capacity lengthy shutdown. So, if we wantedto be double that. There will be 90,000its current for a to add on and renovate the presentbushels of storage and three scales. Itgeneration and we plant we would probably have to shutwill be much more automated than the down for a year, which really isn't ancurrent plant which will help to addresshope that itll have option for any business, right? We can'tongoing labour shortage issues that areopportunities to say to our customers, well, you got tobeing seen across agriculture in Canada.go somewhere else for a year. So, weIt means we'll have a modern up toexpand in the future. determined that we needed to have adate facility with the latest technology Colin Felstadnew build, he explains. in it. The technology keeps changing Adjacent land to the west of the seedin seed cleaning as it does in other cleaning plant in the Westlock industrialindustries, Felstad says. Hopefully, it's park became available, so the co-opa generational project, hopefully it's purchased it for the new plant to be builtcurrent for a generation and we hope on. The current plant is able to run andthat it'll have opportunities to expand in be fully functional while the new plant isthe future.under construction next to it. There has Ashley RobinsonSpring 2023 27"