Processor to buy peas directly from farmers

PORTAGE LA PRAIRIE, Man. — Why deal with hundreds of individual farmers when you could just hire a grain company to do the work?

“It’s about traceability,” said Roquette Canada procurement manager Derek MacLean.

“The closer we can get to the raw material, and the closer we get to our end-use customers, that whole chain should be tied together.”

The Roquette pea protein processing plant has been scaling up test runs for most of the past year, but is easing toward full production this fall and winter. It’s a giant facility — the largest of its type in the world — and the most technologically advanced. It is the proud child of its French parent’s foray into the rapidly expanding and evolving plant protein industry.

It sits on a gravelled plain of 67 acres, with the hulking processing and packaging buildings flanked by truckload testing, weighing and unloading facilities. That highlights the fact that this plant, with its 125,000 tonne per year processing capacity, will be fed by a year-round parade of trucks rather than rail cars, and that’s how its products will leave as well.

Roquette hasn’t chosen the easy way to receive crop and ship product, which is part of its focus on tight crop and product specifications, and its ability to connect the final product to the farms that provided its raw materials.

“That’s what our customers are asking for,” said MacLean.

The plant hasn’t been built in the heart of Western Canada’s yellow pea territory, which is in Saskatchewan, but sited near significant crop production, power lines and pipelines, by highways and infrastructure that can take Roquette’s products throughout North America. Demand for pea protein and other products for human food, pet food, livestock feed and other uses has been surging for years and Roquette sees that continuing.

“There doesn’t appear to be any limit on where the market’s going,” said Michelle Finley, Roquette Canada’s public affairs manager.

That demand includes demanding buyers who are very particular about specifications, including those who want organic peas. That’s why Roquette doesn’t want to rely upon third parties to find the peas for them, and why it has hired agronomists for both conventional and organic production to help farmers produce the crops that are acceptable to the end users.

Those agronomists had their work cut out for them this past summer when farmers who contracted with the company grappled with severe drought. The company expects to be sourcing conventional peas from as far west as Swift Current, Sask., in its “phase one” operations, and beyond that as it expands. For organic peas, it is already sourcing crop from northern Alberta.

Contracted farmers were lucky to have act-of-God clauses in their contracts for 2021-22 and that provision continues with the recently opened 2022-23 contracts. Something new with new crop contracts is the ability to leave the sales price open, a feature many growers have wanted after the bull market of the past two years, with generally rising prices.

“We made some tweaks,” said MacLean.

“We’re not requiring guys to price if they’re still bullish.”

The plant can only store a few days of processing supply, so it has tried to write storage incentives into the contracts.

“We’re a processing facility. We need product 12 months a year,” said MacLean.