Blumenort shop good fit for Ridgewood farmers

It may not be too long before the next generation of Penners will be found working on the family farm, four miles east of Blumenort. But this time around, they will not be farming, but rather becoming part of the family’s welding, machining and manufacturing enterprise.

In 2008, Elden and Corey Penner, like many others at the time, found it impossible to make a living raising hogs. Elden opted for an off-farm welding job with Brian Thiessen, and Corey went on to do other things.

Thiessen had left hog farming to others in 2004, sold his farm to the Penners and established a machine and welding shop at Blumenort.

Years later, when Thiessen decided to retire, Elden and his son Corey purchased Blue Ridge Welding, and the father and son team was re-united at what is today Heritage Steel Works.

Along with the welding and machining operation at Blue Ridge, Thiessen was manufacturing a piece of equipment he developed for delivering a consistent supply of water-soluble medication to livestock and poultry.

Thiessen developed the product, called Medimix, in the late 1980s and Elden and Corey Penner have continued to manufacture a limited quantity of that product, along with their welding and machining operations.

The Medimix machine mixes the solution in a 15-gallon or 30-gallon tank on a timer and maintains the integrity of the medication by keeping it from settling out over time. Medicating livestock should be easy, and the Medimix system is effective for all farms that require water-soluble medication for hogs, chickens, turkeys, beef or dairy.

Corey says Medimix is sold through livestock and poultry equipment dealers from Ontario to B.C. Early on, the Blumenort company had manufactured the machine for direct sales to producers in the United States, but that didn’t work out too well, because the product hasn’t taken off down south.

It didn’t take long for the Penners to establish their reputation as “neighborhood welders” and within a year of buying the company in 2017, Heritage Steel Works had outgrown its space at the shop at Blumenort.

As the company grew, Elden and Corey found they were pressed for more manufacturing space and needed a larger facility than what they had at Blumenort. The solution was close at hand and a major renovation to the then empty hog barn at the farm, four miles to the southeast, has been perfect to handle the overflow from the Blumenort location.

One of the major pieces of manufacturing equipment they now had space for in the manufacturing division of Heritage Steel Works is a press break and shear capable of transforming 12-foot sheet metal and plates for any number of applications, from truck frames to stair pans for the construction industry.

During the pandemic, Heritage Steel Works was kept busy manufacturing the frames and steps for 10 trailers a week for a company at Blumenort that provided “washrooms on wheels” for construction sites. These small units, five feet wide and 10-feet long, were equipped with electricity to produce hot running water from a tank, as well as toilets and a tank for sewage.

In a sense, Elden Penner’s off-farm job has moved back to his farm. The shifting of gears, so to speak, for Elden, who was the third generation of the Penner family on the farm, has led to a successful agriculture-based business, ready for the fourth and fifth generations to take over.

Elden says his family had been raising pigs “forever”, when he took his welding skills off the farm in 2008. He has been welding since his father, Martin P. Penner, bought a welder when he was 16, Elden said.

His new-found welding skills came in extremely handy on the farm over the years, as they did everything from building their own pens for the hogs and rebuilding a “honey wagon”.

Corey kind of followed in his father’s footsteps when he was a teenager and took up welding, as well. Elden recalls Corey built a bale trailer as one of his projects.

The hog industry was not treating anybody well at the turn of the century, but Elden decided to keep going after his neighbor quit in 2004. Four years later, the 450-farrow-to-finish operation wasn’t looking at a bright future and hog prices were still dropping, so Elden and Corey decided it was time for a change.

Corey says at that point his dad went to help Thiessen at Blue Ridge Welding, and he went on to do a number of off-farm jobs, ranging from driving a semi locally to managing a kitchen cabinet company.

For the next eight years, Elden worked at Blue Ridge Welding until Brian Thiessen decided it was time to retire. A couple of years before that, Elden and Corey had discussed the possibilities of purchasing the company and Thiessen had agreed to sell to them when he retired.

“I quit what I was doing, joined Dad, and we bought the Blumenort shop.”

Today, Penner describes what they do as mostly “one-off specialty manufacturing and all areas of welding and machinery repair jobs.”

Creating specialty products for agriculture operations is one of the many areas he works in, Crey says

“A chicken farmer came in complaining about a door lift system he didn’t like and we found a way to make it operate better. When we left that farm, the door was no longer dragging on the cement.”

Repairs in the agriculture world of beef and dairy, where equipment in barns need repairs and maintenance of farm equipment like cultivators and other farm machinery, provides Heritage Steel Works with as much work as they want.

Equipment in barns needs repairs and in some cases the mobile guys get called in, Corey said, but often a piece of equipment, like a feed cart, is brought in to Heritage Steel for repairs.

The fourth generation of the Penner family is already working at Heritage Steel Works. Corey’s son Alex and son-in-law Mike Peters have joined dad and grandpa in the growing business.

Elden says he started slowing down a year-and-a-half ago and now he is at home recovering from heart surgery and hasn’t been in the shop for a while.

But he isn’t ready to be completely retired just yet. One of the projects he has been working on for years and would like to finish is the restoration of a Farmall-A tractor his father bought new in 1951.

He rebuilt it once before in the early 1980s and drove it until the 1990s, when something went wrong and there was not time to spare to fix it.

During the latest restoration project, there are not too many pieces of the tractor that haven’t needed Elden’s attention. At this stage, it is ready to be put back together, and Corey is hoping his father will remember where each of the hundreds of pieces, spread out on the floor in a corner of the shop belongs.

Elden says he has already started to put the engine back together and hopes to be able to get back to his project soon.

“It’s been kind of fun.”