Agricore United was a farmer-directed

agribusiness Agribusiness is the industry, enterprises, and the field of study of value chains in agriculture and in the bio-economy, in which case it is also called bio-business or bio-enterprise. The primary goal of agribusiness is to maximize profit w ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

. It supplied crop nutrition and crop protection products, and offered grain handling and marketing services. It was created on November 1, 2001 by the merger of Agricore and

United Grain Growers The United Grain Growers, or UGG, was a Canadian grain farmers' cooperative for grain storage and distribution that operated between 1917 and 2001. History In 1917, the Grain Growers' Grain Company (GGGC) merged with the Alberta Farmers' Co- ...

. It was headquartered in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Its shares were publicly traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) under the symbol "AU" ("AU.LV" - Limited voting common shares; "AU.DB" - Convertible 9% debentures; "AU.PR.A" - Series 'A' preferred shares) until June 15, 2007, when it was taken over by the

Saskatchewan Wheat Pool The Saskatchewan Wheat Pool was a grain handling, agri-food processing and marketing company based in Regina, Saskatchewan. The Pool created a network of marketing alliances in North America and internationally which made it the largest agricul ...

. Agri-business giant

Archer Daniels Midland The Archer-Daniels-Midland Company, commonly known as ADM, is an American multinational food processing and commodities trading corporation founded in 1902 and headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. The company operates more than 270 plants and 42 ...

(ADM) had a 28% stake in the company at the time of the takeover.

Corporate history

Ancestry

Agricore United was the continuation of several companies with deep historical roots in western Canada. The

Grain Growers' Grain Company The Grain Growers' Grain Company (GGGC) was a farmers' cooperative founded in the prairie provinces of western Canada in 1906. The GGGC met strong resistance from existing grain dealers. It was forced off the Winnipeg Grain Exchange and almost fail ...

Limited was originally incorporated in 1906 under the laws of Manitoba. In 1917, The Grain Growers' Grain Company Limited and The Alberta Farmers' Cooperative Elevator Company Limited amalgamated to form

Limited (UGG). In 1923, the

Alberta Wheat Pool The Alberta Wheat Pool was the first of Canada's wheat farmer co-operatives in 1923. History Early years In 1923, the United Farmers of Alberta met with then Attorney General John Edward Brownlee to consider setting up a Wheat Pool just in Alb ...

(AWP) was incorporated under the laws of Alberta. In 1924, Manitoba Pool Elevators (MPE) was incorporated under the laws of Manitoba. In 1992, UGG was continued under the Governing Act, a Special Act of the Parliament of Canada. In 1998 AWP and MPE merged to form Agricore Cooperative Limited. In 2001, UGG combined its business operations with Agricore Cooperative Ltd. and began doing business as Agricore United.

Takeover

In November 2006, the company became the target of takeover bids from two other rival grain handlers: the

("SaskPool", "SWP") of

Regina, Saskatchewan Regina () is the capital city of the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian province of Saskatchewan. The city is the second-largest in the province, after Saskatoon, and is a commercial centre for southern Saskatchewan. As of the 2021 C ...

and

Winnipeg Winnipeg () is the capital and largest city of the province of Manitoba in Canada. It is centred on the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, near the longitudinal centre of North America. , Winnipeg had a city population of 749,6 ...

-based James Richardson International ("JRI"). The initial and subsequent offers from SaskPool involved a stock swap, with no or little cash being offered, prompting the AU Board of Directors to reject them. In February 2007, AU and JRI announced that they had negotiated a merger arrangement to form a publicly traded company to be known as "Richardson Agricore", subject to shareholder agreement. A subsequent bidding war led to a stock+cash offer from SaskPool and an all-cash offer from JRI to form a private company; a higher, $20.50 all-cash offer from SaskPool in May eventually prevailed, with 81% of the limited voting shares being tendered to the Pool by shareholders by the end of May, including all the ADM shares. This exceeded the 75% required by the terms of AU's incorporation to change the corporate structure and, after a special shareholders' meeting in June, AU became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool. AU's CEO, Brian Hayward, resigned, as did the Board of Directors, and SaskPool's CEO and Board were voted in. SaskPool had Agricore United's common and preferred shares delisted from the

Toronto Stock Exchange The Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX; french: Bourse de Toronto) is a stock exchange located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is the 10th largest exchange in the world and the third largest in North America based on market capitalization. Based in t ...

(TSX) on June 20, 2007, and the members of the senior management team for the amalgamated company were announced the next day. As of June 29, no decision had been reached on the name or location of the new company, and it was expected to take about 12 months to complete the merging of the company's operations. As a result of the acceptance of the SaskPool offer, JRI received a $35 million termination fee and was able to purchase a number of AU's grain and farm supply facilities;

Cargill Cargill, Incorporated, is a privately held American global food corporation based in Minnetonka, Minnesota, and incorporated in Wilmington, Delaware. Founded in 1865, it is the largest privately held corporation in the United States in ter ...

Canada was able to make a similar purchase, as part of a pre-merger deal width SaskPool to satisfy Canada's Competition Bureau. AU employees, along with the grain and farm supply inventories at the affected facilities, were transferred to the purchasing companies. It is generally believed within the Canadian agricultural industry that the biggest winners in the transaction were AU's shareholders, with SaskPool paying too much for AU, and that SaskPool gave up too many facilities to their competitors. Substantial number of head office employees are expected to be laid off once the integration of the two companies is complete. On August 30, 2007, the company formerly known as Agricore United ceased to exist and Saskatchewan Wheat Pool was rebranded to be known as

Viterra Viterra began as a Canadian grain handling business, the nation's largest grain handler, with its historic formative roots in prairie grain-handling cooperatives, among them the iconic Saskatchewan Wheat Pool. Viterra Inc grew into a global agr ...

Operations

Grain handling and merchandising

Agricore bought, marketed and transported grain, oil seeds and other special crops from the farm to end-use markets using the company's network of grain elevators from Manitoba to British Columbia and ownership/interest in port terminals in Vancouver, Thunder Bay and Prince Rupert. The grain was moved from the farmer's field to the company's geographically dispersed and strategically located country elevator network. Grain was then shipped to a domestic, U.S. or Mexican customer, such as a flour mill, crushing plant, feed mill or maltster, or to a port terminal for export to end-use customers in Europe, South America, the Pacific Rim, Africa and the Middle East.

Crop production services

The company sold more crop inputs in western Canada than any other company. This included manufacture, distribution and crop production support, including crop nutrition and crop protection products, seed and agronomic services to farmers, through about 200 locations from Manitoba to British Columbia. Agronomic Crop Enhancement (ACE) specialists provide technical advice on crop production issues and help the Customer Service Representative (CSR) advise the grower about choices for the most profitable crop practices. Beyond offering crop nutrition such as fertilizers, more than 200 crop protection products were offered including herbicides and insecticides. Agricore owned or leases three distribution warehouses, and supported the sale of crop nutrition and protection products by providing custom application services directly or through third-party contractors.

Livestock

The company's livestock business formulated and manufactured feed for dairy and beef cattle, swine, poultry and other specialty feeds from seven

HACCP Hazard analysis and critical control points, or HACCP (), is a systematic preventive approach to food safety from biological, chemical, and physical hazards in production processes that can cause the finished product to be unsafe and designs mea ...

certified feed mills, one HACCP certified pre-mix manufacturing centre and one HACCP compliant pre-mix manufacturing centre. The company had feed mills and pre-mix facilities service customers in B.C., Alberta and Manitoba, including two new feed mills constructed in Olds, AB (2000) and Edmonton, AB (2004).

References

External links

Former website
(June 6, 2007 snapshot from the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

)
Viterra corporate website
{{Authority control Agriculture companies of Canada Defunct companies of Manitoba Canadian companies established in 2001 Companies disestablished in 2007 Defunct agriculture companies Grain companies Stock and station agencies Agriculture companies established in 2001 Agricultural organizations based in Manitoba