HARMONY BEEF ON TRACK
Balzac processing plant set to open
A long-shuttered beef-processing plant in Rocky View County will open its doors under new ownership by the end of the month, two years later than originally anticipated.
Harmony Beef — the new name for the former Rancher’s Beef plant near Balzac — will begin slaughtering cattle Feb. 27, according to Rich Vesta, the plant’s owner. It will open with 175 employees, and is expected to ramp up to full production of 750 to 800 head a day within a year. Ultimately, the plant could employ between 350 and 375 people, Vesta said.
The plant — located north of Stoney Trail not far from the Calgary city limits — will not only provide a third processing option to western Canadian beef producers faced with a Cargill-JBS duopoly, but will also be the largest facility in Canada built to European Union standards. Though the plant has not yet applied for EU certification, if it does, it will have the ability to take advantage of increased export opportunities brought about by this week’s passage of the Canada-EU trade agreement.
While Vesta said he is feeling good about the upcoming opening, he acknowledged getting to this point has not been easy. When the veteran cattleman (Vesta has held executive positions at some of the best-known meat companies in the U.S., including JBS) bought the plant out of bankruptcy three years ago, he set an opening date of January 2015. That date was pushed off due to lengthy delays in securing permits for the unique water recycling facility Vesta wanted to construct at the site.
“We didn’t fully anticipate the regulations and variances that needed to be accomplished before that could be done, from a provincial and a county standpoint,” Vesta said in an interview. “So it was a learning experience.”
The plant also faced opposition from the City of Calgary, with Mayor Naheed Nenshi, local real estate developers and residents of northeast subdivisions expressing concerns about possible odours once Harmony Beef is in operation. To allay those fears, Harmony hired an independent odour consultant to review its planned practices, and will soon be installing a device on the plant that will notify management if a smell is emitted.
That comes on top of the “multimillions” in retrofits Vesta said he has poured into the plant since its purchase to make it state-of-theart in everything from environmental responsibility to animal-handling practices.
On Tuesday, Nenshi told reporters he still has concerns.
“The city continues to believe that that is not the ideal location for that kind of use. In fact, there are even more people living just across Stoney Trail from there,” Nenshi said. “But it is opening, so we have to take the landowner and operator at face value — that they really are going to mitigate noise and odour concerns for the neighbours.”
Vesta said he is confident Calgarians will soon realize there fears were unfounded. He said odours generated from beef-processing plants generally come from rendering or hide processing — neither of which will be done at the Harmony Beef site. In addition, there are no lagoons or feedlot pens on site that could cause a stench.
Rocky View County Reeve Greg Boehlke said he doesn’t expect any trouble with odour and added the county would require it to be addressed quickly if it did become a problem.
“The development permit calls for stringent guidelines on odour control. They have a state-of-theart system, and we will be monitoring it,” Boehlke said. “We made a commitment to the city that we will be monitoring it … So I don’t think there will be any issue there whatsoever.”
The Rancher’s Beef plant was built a decade ago by a group of beef industry investors who wanted to give the cattle industry access to much-needed slaughter capacity in light of the post-BSE U.S. border closure. However, it ran into financial difficulties and closed in 2007 after just 14 months in operation. Sunterra Beef later bought the plant for an undisclosed amount, but never reopened it.
Bryan Walton, CEO of the Alberta Cattle Feeders Association, said the industry has waited a long time for the plant to reopen. He said the obstacles Harmony Beef has faced — from permitting and regulatory delays to vocal opposition from nearby Calgary — shouldn’t have happened.
“We were concerned with the kind of holdups we saw with this business — or for that matter, with any other that would want to locate in Rocky View or any other county,” Walton said. “If we want the Alberta advantage to be real, then these kinds of impediments can’t block businesses from investing in this province, or delay them, or push them to other jurisdictions.”