Picton Port in Prince Edward County.
Nelson Zandbergen
Farmers Forum
PICTON — Eastern Ontario farmers will get another much-needed export outlet for their crops with the planned addition of grain-handling facilities at an existing deep-water port on Lake Ontario in Prince Edward County.
The facility owner, Picton Terminals, has teamed up with Parrish & Heimbecker (P&H) to build a bulk agricultural marine terminal at the 70-year-old port site on Picton Bay, about 2 km north of the village of Picton, at the east end of Lake Ontario. The partners announced the project in mid-August after Prince Edward County settled a long-standing legal dispute over the municipality’s attempt to impose local rules on the federally regulated port.
The port first went into operation in 1955 to ship steel pellets mined in Marmora, 70 km northwest of Picton. The site fell into disuse when the mine closed in 1978. In 2014, an investment company controlled by the Doornekamp family bought the port and began reviving shipping and freight activities — to the chagrin of some Picton-area residents.
Nevertheless, construction on P&H’s grain-handling facility is supposed to begin this fall, and farmers are happy at the prospect. Price and size of the development haven’t been revealed, but Maizeing Acres owner Peter Archer, a local Grain Farmer of Ontario director, said he understands that it will have a throughput of 350,000 metric tonnes per year.
“We’re very export driven around here and having that facility is going to be a good deal,” said Archer, who operates grain elevators in Trenton and Campbellford. He looked forward to sending fewer trucks through Toronto to deliver soybeans at the Hamilton terminal. “It’s going to be a good thing for us. It’s going to cut our freight a bunch.”
Based on his experience, he suggested the facility could be operational within a year but would likely need two years to be fully completed.
The news struck Prince Edward County cash-cropper Lloyd Crow as “nothing but positive.”
Said Crowe: “Anytime there’s a port that close, I would think that’s a lot of saved miles on a truck going to Hamilton or wherever.”
Crowe also observed that the development would mark an historical return to Prince Edward County exporting food to the world from its own shores, noting, “We used to be a main shipping hub.”
Peter Archer also contrasted P&H’s privately funded Picton plans with recent work undertaken at the port in Oshawa, 160 km away. That government-affiliated site erected a second 10,000-bushel grain bin this summer — at a cost he estimated at $3 million — despite handling very little grain last year, according to Archer. The unionized Oshawa port received a $14-million expansion grant and has been criticized for being inefficient and under-used for grain handling.
P&H tried to team up with Oshawa port to ship grain but it didn’t work out and turned its attention to Picton, Archer said.
