Features Agronomy Storage
Minnedosa farmer wins $ 12,000 Harvest Ready Contest

Barry McNabb (left) receives congratulations from Meridian’s Sid Lockhart (right) and Top Crop Manager’s Kevin Yaworsky.

June 26, 2009 – The four-hour trip was well worth it for Barry McNabb from Minnedosa, Manitoba. He made the trip to the Western Canadian Farm Progress Show June 18, and came away with a Meridian grain bin and skid package valued at $12,000. “It is very nice of Meridian to allow me to pick and choose the type of bin I would like, and to let me apply the $12,000 credit to the bin I wanted.  I can pick the bin that fits my operation,” says McNabb.

The Harvest Ready Contest was a three-way partnership between Top Crop Manager magazine, Meridian and Farm Credit Corporation. It started in November 2008 and ran until the announcement of the Grand Prize winner at the Farm Progress Show in Regina. There were five monthly prize winners who received an Ag Expert software package from FCC. These winners were posted on the www.topcropmanager.com throughout the course of the winter.

Sid Lockhart, Marketing Manager with Meridian Manufacturing Group says the Harvest Ready Contest generated a lot of interest in Meridian bins, and that he is considering a similar contest for 2010. “The contest provided us with good exposure to top farm managers across Canada. It helped build our brand awareness with farmers who may not be familiar with our new company’s trademark.”

For more than 40 years, Meridian was known for the Friesen, Grain Max, Stor-King and Wheatland brands, which were incorporated under the Meridian trademark in 2008. Meridian Manufacturing Group is the largest producer of smooth-wall hopper bins, with four offices and manufacturing facilities in North America. 

McNabb is already familiar with the Meridian brand, as the owner of several Stor-King grain bins. He farms 2200 acres of canola, wheat, barley and oats, and has an 80-head cow-calf operation. “The Meridian bin will be a nice addition to our grain storage facilities. I’m looking at adding some aeration options, and would like to match the Meridian bin up to the rest of our grain storage bins.”

Meridian products are used extensively for storage needs in the agricultural, commercial, petroleum and the oil and gas industries. Products include smooth-wall hopper bins, seed tenders, double-wall fuel tanks, specialty oil tanks and custom-designed tanks and silos. “The Meridian brand has a lot of history, and as the company that developed the original smooth-walled bin, that history has allowed us continually innovate and improve our storage systems so that we have the bins that provide the best value to farmers,” says Lockhart.

McNabb has run a zero-till farming system since the early 1990s, and uses a New Noble air drill with 10-inch spacing and an Adam jet opener for seed placement. He pre-bands liquid fertilizer in the fall with Dutch knives. His advice to new zero-tillers is to be patient. “You need five to six years for the soil structure to improve, for the earthworms to come back, and for the soil to become more mellow. I find that we have better water infiltration, which helps in our area because we generally have too much moisture rather than too little.”

For more information on Meridian Manufacturing and their storage solutions, go to www.meridianmfg.com .