Increasing demand for flax fibre

Source: Saskatchewan Agriculture and Food

It’s pretty amazing stuff. You can wear it. You can build with it. You can insulate your house with it. However, here in Saskatchewan, where we grow oilseed flax, little of the straw is used for processing.

Alvin Ulrich, the president of Biolin Research, is trying to change that through his work as the director of Crop Fibres Canada, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Saskatchewan Flax Development Commission.

Crop Fibres Canada is a pilot plant, testing and resource facility for straw processing and fibre and shive (the non-fibre portion of the flax stem) production. Ulrich says they are currently working on ways to capitalize on the growing demand for flax fibre.

“People are going back to natural fibres and they are looking for a stronger fibre for industrial applications,” said Ulrich.

The flax fibre pilot project is partially funded by Saskatchewan Agriculture and Food’s Agriculture Development Fund through its contribution to Flax Canada 2015, a federal initiative aimed at developing the added value potential of flax. This year, there is a cluster of flax producers in the Hepburn and Redvers areas involved in the project.

Ulrich says there are some new procedures to follow in order to maximize the value of the fibre in the straw rather than just picking up what comes from the back of the combine.

“Last year, with most of the farmers, we were able to use a stripper/header. It just strips the seed off the plant so that the straw is standing as tall as possible. Then we got some rollers and rolled it several times. That breaks off the straw in long pieces and gets it flat on the ground,” he noted.

“When we get rain, all of the pieces get a chance to get wet, and all of the pieces are touching the ground. As a result, the microbes in the soil have an easy chance to colonize the pieces of straw, so they start growing on the straw and start decomposing it.”

These extra steps may be part of the reason why the flax fibre industry has yet to take off, despite the fact that Saskatchewan produces 70 per cent of the Canadian crop.

“[Flax is] often the last crop planted in the spring. It’s often the last crop harvested because it can over-winter, so it tends to get pushed off to the end, and often, at the end of season, producers just want to get done and they may not want to fuss around with any extra steps,” Ulrich said.

Ulrich hopes that the net result of the work at the Crop Fibres Canada facility will be targeted end-uses for the fibre, with enough margin to be able to pay farmers to do more in the field to maximize the value of the straw, or even to be able to pay a processor to do it for them.

“We may be able to come up with a system where it is the processing plant that will do those extra operations. The farmer might receive less money, but won’t have to do the extra work. That would make the farmer happy, make the processor happy, and make everybody happy,” he stated.

“That’s the challenge – how do we get that first model plant up and working?” Ulrich says that’s the key to getting out of the catch-22 that currently holds the industry back. Producers won’t grow more flax for fibre without a processing plant, but investors aren’t going to put up the $5 million to $10 million necessary to build a processing plant unless producers are growing more flax for fibre.

However, Ulrich is positive about the future of flax fibre.

“We have more and more overseas customers who are interested in what we are doing and interested in investing. They wouldn’t be here if there weren’t some promising results,” he noted.

“There is no doubt we are seeing a growing interest. I am very positive it will happen. I’m just not certain when it will happen.”

For more information, contact:
Alvin Ulrich, Director
Crop Fibres Canada
Phone: (306) 955-4506
E-mail: aulrich@biolin.sk.ca