A ground-breaking ceremony was held Monday, Oct. 25 for the expansion of the Prairie Gleaners facility. (Photo Courtesy Chris Brown)

By Chris Brown

Fighting food insecurity

Ground broken on Prairie Gleaners facility expansion

Oct 25, 2021 | 4:55 PM

CYPRESS COUNTY, AB – A bigger facility will allow Prairie Gleaners Society to up its yearly output of meals by around 50 per cent and thereby increase the aid it gives locally and around the world.

Ground was broken today on the 4,000-square-foot expansion of the society’s facility in Cypress County.

President Ed Codding said that as an organization they recognized that food insecurity worldwide is not getting better and they searched for a way to produce more food. It became clear they needed more space.

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“More space for our volunteers to work, more space for dehydrators to prepare the vegetables, more storage space, we just need more space,” he said at the Monday ground-breaking ceremony.

“Right now generally in a year we will prepare 2,500,000, 2,600,000 meals and with this expansion when we’re up and running that will probably be closer to 3,500,000 to 4 million meals a year.”

Prairie Gleaners takes off-grade vegetables unable to be sold and dehydrates and packages them.

This vegetable mix is distributed to the Mustard Seed in Medicine Hat and also shipped around the world to countries like Venezuela, Nicaragua and the Ukraine.

Codding says the building will be built over the winter, it will be populated next summer and be fully running about one year from now.

Codding said Big Marble Farms has been an integral donor in the expansion lending its building expertise with the help of partners Capstone Concrete, Tanc Developments, Alta-Wide Builders Supplies, Spider Electric, Inland Concrete, Benchmark Geomatics and Art’s Excavating.