YORKTON - Not surprisingly, Yorkton Mayor Mitch Hippsley was smiling last Tuesday as he attended the official groundbreaking ceremony for Louis Dreyfus Company’s new pea protein isolate production plant.
The construction of the plant – announced some months ago – is huge in terms of the local economy.
The multi-million-dollar plant means a significant number of construction jobs over the next 18 months if LDC is to achieve its announced operational date of sometime in 2025.
When you have work crews on-site when not working they tend to spend money in the community – hotels, meals, new work boots and more. That’s good news for businesses here in Yorkton.
Once operational the pea processing facility will employ roughly 60. Those are new, permanent jobs.
Permanent jobs mean house sales. They mean vehicle sales. That’s more good news for the Yorkton business community.
But, permanent jobs are also about families.
Families are even better news for a community.
Families mean children in school. It means kids using recreational facilities. It means families doing things in the city, many of those things meaning they spend money, and that money ripples through the economy in multiple ways.
We have all seen the impact locally of the LDC canola crushing facility launched in 2009, and currently undergoing a major plant expansion, and now the pea plant builds on that.
Yorkton, of course, has always existed because of agriculture.
It was the promise of land which brought the first European settlers here, and Yorkton basically sprang up to serve those farm settlers.
Processing farm production naturally followed.
We see an early example of that in the historic brick flour mill saved from the wrecking ball and now undergoing expansion to become a tourist draw for the city.
And, if we look at the city’s history agriculture is woven into it throughout the years, from a local ‘Bacon for Britain’ farm during the war, to once being a major turkey processing centre, to the place the famed Morris rodweeder was produced.
Today, Yorkton remains very much a hub for rural east-central Saskatchewan, largely as a service centre for agriculture.
Each year millions of bushels of grains and oilseeds arrive here from a massive catchment area destined for grain elevator distribution, or processing at facilities for oats, flax, canola and now soon peas.
Such processing is good for area farmers – local markets mean marketing options.
For Yorkton, and ultimately for the province too, value-added agriculture processing builds economy on the strong foundation of farming. It’s one of those classic win-win situations.
No wonder Mayor Hippsley was smiling last week.
