Kainai Forage sets a new record with a 40,000 tonne first cut and it has no plans of stopping there

Kainai-Blood Chief Roy Fox (Blackfoot name Makiinima) stands in front of a painting of Stamikso’sak, a Blood Tribe war chief from the early 1800s. Photo:Supplied 

NationTalk: Alberta Farmer Express – Four years ago, Kainai Forage set out to increase its premium forage production fivefold by 2024. If its first cut is any indication, it could be on its way to that 100,000-tonne goal.

The plant-to-processing company recently set a record-best first cut when it harvested more than 40,000 tonnes of export-destined timothy hay grown under irrigation. In June, it celebrated a single-day harvest of 8,000 bales.

These are the latest in a series of wins for the nearly 30-year-old company and the Kainai-Blood Tribe, the First Nation in southwestern Alberta that co-owns it.

“That’s great news for us,” said Roy Fox (Blackfoot name Makiinima), chief of the 12,000-strong tribe.

“It assures us that this project was the right kind of project to get into. It ensures that there is a good return coming back to the tribe. It ensures that many of our people find employment, either directly at the forage plant or working for the farmers who have leases, including our own (Blood Tribe) farmers.”

Kainai Forage employs more than 50 people, primarily from the reserve, and leases several parcels of land to tribe farmers. Company employment landed close to 100 people at harvest, said Fox.

The Blood Reserve, at 1,400 square kilometres, is the largest First Nations reserve in Canada by area. The forage business is a good news story from a place that doesn’t always have the best news to tell.

A Google search for news from the Blood Reserve can be grim: many stories paint a picture of a community in the throes of drug addiction and overdose deaths.

The hay operation, which formed in 1997 as the Blood Tribe Forage Processing Plant, has had success over the years, including direct trade relationships with companies in Japan, Ireland, England, the United Arab Emirates and others.

However, its 2019 partnership with Indigena Capital, a venture capital firm focused on First Nations interests, has supercharged its capacity with a $45 million expansion plan that so far has included a new plant and hay press that can process more than 125,000 tonnes of hay per year.

For perspective on how much Kainai Forage’s fortunes have changed, consider that last year it harvested 52,000 tonnes on both cuts, compared to this year’s 40,000 on a single cut. Fox said the true secret of its success is ongoing dedication to sustainable soil practices.

“We have always had a good relationship with the Earth. We’ve always respected the Earth and we wanted to ensure that in this case, we did the same. “The more that we can provide for ourselves, then the more sovereign we will become. We can get back to that point where our ancestors provided for themselves entirely through their own initiative and their own hard work.”

The story of Kainai Forage goes back to the 1950s and construction of the St. Mary’s Dam irrigation project. It’s a story that underscores the tribe’s changing relationship with government in terms of bargaining power.

“We provided some of the land on which the St. Mary’s Dam is on,” Fox said. “One of the agreements was that whenever the Blood Tribe wanted to go into irrigation farming, the federal government would help in that development.”

That time came in the 1980s and ‘90s with a large project in which the reserve become home to 25,000 acres of irrigation land. The next question was what to do with it.

Market and soil studies and a variety of experimental developments played a role in the decision, which ultimately favoured timothy hay as the best crop in terms of return on investment and soil regeneration. Fox said the soil was in rough shape after a number of dryland leasers were finished with it.

“A lot of them did not follow good farming practices so a lot of erosion was occurring,” he said.“There was an expression that was used, while we were developing, that we would tell others: unfortunately, some of those farmers were mining the lands to death.”

A rotation out of timothy every seven or eight years, usually into cereal crops or oilseeds, seems to work for Kainai Forage, said Fox. Rotations have given the company chances to experiment.

“At one time we grew Kentucky bluegrass seed. We haven’t done that lately. We also grew hybrid canola seed. We’re always looking at how best to rotate the land but mostly it’s there to grow forage crops.”

The needs of an early client from Japan proved a major driver in the Tribe’s decision to grow timothy. “At that time only about 11 per cent of Japan was arable. There wasn’t even enough land to grow crops to feed their people, let alone their dairy cows. They had to import the forage crops,” said Fox.

A Japanese company learned of land in Alberta that was looking for clientele and could be a fit for the kind of forage it sought for Japanese dairy cattle. So it just so happens that during those discussions, they found out that we had huge tracts of irrigated land which we could probably grow timothy on,” Fox said.

Timothy hay has a long, rich history in Japan, said Fox. The country grown and fed timothy for centuries, and at one time the island of Hokkaido had a lot of production.

“So the arrangements were made and we went to Japan and they came here several times. We went to Japan once and we finalized a deal,” Fox said. “It was a good mix. It was an arrangement where we needed each other. The president and I shared some of our business practices. Some of them are quite similar. In the end, all it took was a handshake and the deal was done.”

Fox signals cautious optimism on when Kainai Forage will reach its 100,000 tonne goal. We’re hoping we’ll reach that in about three or four years. I’m being overly optimistic,” he said. However, Justin Ferguson, vice-president of Indigena Capital, thinks the milestone could be reached sooner.

“We actually could get it even sooner than that, depending on how everything comes together. Next year will potentially be even better. So let’s see how the second cut goes.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeff Melchior, Reporter

A graduate of the Lethbridge Communications Arts program, Jeff’s career has included writing and editing for a variety of Alberta publications and agencies, including the Temple City Star, Meristem Resources and Prairie Hog Country.