ST. PAUL — A $200,000 provincial grant will help the County of St. Paul and its regional partners study and promote opportunities to grow the agriculture industry across the St. Paul region.
The funding, acquired through the Alberta Community Partnership (ACP) program, aims to support the STEP Regional Economic Development Alliance's Regional Agricultural Strategic Opportunity Assessment project. STEP is the regional economic development partnership between County of St. Paul, Town of St. Paul, Town of Elk Point, and Summer Village of Horseshoe Bay.
The project, which would be conducted by Outlook Market Research, involves creating an inventory of agricultural assets in nine priority areas: feedstock, value-added processing, local food and food sustainability, retail and service sector, agricultural tourism, logistics, land and buildings, communications and marketing, and stakeholder identification.
The project will identify what agricultural resources already exist in the region, said Linda Sallstrom, economic development officer with STEP, explaining that doing an inventory is crucial in finding opportunities to grow and develop agriculture in St. Paul.
"What we want is investor confidence. We want an investor to know that they will be successful . . . that they'll be supported. The only way to do that is to be able to provide them the data that shows them that . . . whatever it is they need is already available here in this region," such as labour and transportation, she said.
“No investor is going to come here based on opinion,” said Sallstrom.
The project is expected to be done by June 2026.
"It doesn't mean that we're not going to do any other work until then. We're concurrently working on other activities that will support this project and vice versa," including working with the Municipal Seed Cleaning Plant in St. Paul for potential expansion, and studying the feasibility of meat processing in the region in partnership with the M.D. of Bonnyville.
"Agriculture touches all of our communities," Sallstrom said, and it's a matter of looking for those opportunities to grow.
