Guests and speakers alike tour the in-progress DIW facility at a formal update on May 28. (rdnewsNOW/Ashley)

By Ashley Lavallee-Koenig

FILLING GAP IN THE MARKET

Dairy Innovation West (milk) shakes up western market

May 28, 2024 | 2:04 PM

Currently undergoing construction, Dairy Innovation West (DIW), a milk processing facility, is poised to make groundbreaking impacts to the transportation and environmental footprint of the dairy industry in western Canada.

Typically, raw milk is transported from Alberta dairies, to processing facilities as far as Abbotsford, B.C., before then being shipped to producers who turn it into cheese, butter, yogurt, and other products.

At DIW, “When raw milk comes in it will either use reverse osmosis or ultra filtration to do a couple things: remove water or concentrate the proteins, or whatever the nutrients are in the milk. After that it’s delivered to its intended processor,” explains Henry Holtman, chair of DIW, at a formal update of the project on May 28.

With this approach, four or five trucks of raw milk will become one truck of processed milk before being shipped to producers, a reduction that Holtman expects will save producers $15 million in transportation costs while also significantly reducing their emission rates.

The project is a feat of collaboration, with Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba’s milk producers, plus 1300 farmers across the west working together to support the development within all four provinces’ regulations.

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The facility is projected to be constructed by November and running by spring 2025 and is located in the Aspelund Industrial Park in Lacombe County.

Construction began in December of 2023 and is expected to be completed for site testing by November 2024. (rdnewsNOW/Ashley Lavallee-Koenig)

“We’ve had conversations over the last four years on this project and when they finally ended up here, we shouted for joy. We have so many dairy producers in central Alberta; we have dairy producers in Ponoka County, Red Deer County Lacombe County and other counties, but the core of the dairy industry in central Alberta is here and to have this facility located here is amazing,” says Barb Shepherd, reeve of Lacombe County.

Minister of Agriculture and Irrigation RJ Sigurdson says that this development fills a need for dairy farmers in the province and represents the overall growth increasing in the area.

“We’re seeing a very exciting amount of investment in processing that’s happening here in Alberta, and this is something that we want to continue to foster as a government,” says Sigurdson. “It’s creating high paying jobs, these jobs are being located in rural Alberta, and this is helping that rural growth and rural revitalization as well as creating amazing jobs and opportunities in the agriculture sector.”

In 2023, Alberta’s industry contributed almost 8.74 per cent of Canada’s milk production and employed 3400 Albertans, says Sigurdson. Dairy Innovation West should create about 200 temporary and permanent jobs between the construction and running of the facility.

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