The Buffalo Slope was a design created by the Alberta Wheat Pool using precast concrete. Somewhat of an experiment in design and materials by the Wheat Pool, only a few of this type were built in the late 1970s. These elevators were capable of holding around 206,000 bushels of grain.
It wasn't the design of this elevator so much as the timing which resulted in such small numbers being built. Railway spur lines were being closed and along with them, small town elevators. Grain companies were beginning to realize the necessity of concentrating their resources, doing away with small elevators and building much larger inland terminals, spaced much further apart than were wooden elevators of yore. It simply wasn't a good time to be building smaller elevators.
A Futuristic Elevator that Lives on in Brazil
Not long ago, Alberta had country grain elevators named for the bison that roamed the plains before grain was grown. The innovative Buffalo, as they were called, were designed in Alberta, and constructed in both Alberta and Brazil. In the late 1970s, times were good for Alberta’s farmers and their grain Company—the Alberta Wheat Pool. Bumper crops and high grain prices kept the grain elevators humming. As fires destroyed many wood elevators, and the railways were pushing for ever more streamlined grain handling, the Pool decided to use some of its profits to experiment with concrete elevator designs. It began working with Buffalo Engineering of Edmonton, headed by Klaus U. Drieger. This resulted in a design for an elevator that was radically different, and a second company, Buffalo Beton Ltd. of Calgary, constructed them.
The first design was the trapezoidal Buffalo 1000, colloquially named the Buffalo Slope. In a complete departure from traditional wood-crib elevator design, this elevator was built up using 42 square precast concrete modules, stacked like cord wood at a thirty degree angle from the ground. The elevator could hold 206,000 bushels.
The first was built at Magrath in 1979 and opened with huge fanfare—the festivities included a community band and tours of the facility. Two more Buffalo Slopes were erected in 1981, at Vegreville and Fort Saskatchewan. The Buffalo Slope design worked well with some grains, but the 30 degree slope was inadequate for barley and oats to slide out the bottom of the module and the complicated conveyor systems were high maintenance. Faced with less than stellar reviews, they went back to the drawing board.
The second design, the Buffalo 2000, was also constructed with precast panels in conjunction with poured-in-place concrete, although it had a more conventional shape. The elevator had vertical bins with hopped bottoms, fashioned with precast bin floors and cast-in-place concrete bin walls. The Buffalo 2000 holds about 190,000 bushels in thirty bins. The Alberta Wheat Pool built two of these, at Lyalta in 1982 and Foremost in 1983. These fireproof elevators worked well, but were expensive. The Pool built nine cheaper wood-cribbed double-composite elevators next, the last one at Dapp in 1985. Then in 1986 a final Buffalo 2000 was built at Boyle, a year before the Buffalo consortium folded.
From Albertas Historic Places