1946 to 2026 Watching Steinbach Grow: Steinbach Hatchery celebrates 90 years

There is an old saying, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going”, but the opposite was true for the feed mill staff in the early days of Steinbach Hatchery. Few men were tough enough to keep going for years on a job that required heaving 100-pound bags of feed onto the back of a farmer’s truck, day-after-day.

But that was then, and now modern equipment to go along with modern technology has made the job much easier than it was when Roy Bartel was a young man, just out of high school.

Actually, Bartel who worked his way up the ranks to become general manager, was working for the company even before he finished high school. And the same holds true for Steinbach Hatchery CEO Joel Friesen, whose father Jake was one of four partners until his death in 2017.

Bartel started working at Maple Grove Farms in August of 1970, when he was living with his grandparents, Peter and Anne Bartel, in Kleefeld. Peter Bartel worked on the Maple Grove farm on Loewen Boulevard and he asked Elvin Reimer whether he had a job for his grandson.

Bartel worked Saturdays and Sundays, gathering eggs, cleaning barns and sometimes hauling pullets. He quit after working there a year and then spent a year working at numerous jobs in western Canada before asking Walter Reimer for his old job back.

Returning to the farm in 1973, Bartel spent the next year-and-a-half there before he was asked to work at the mill in town.

“That was a tough job…bagging and loading 100-pound bags of feed and running the milling equipment.”

Three or four years later, Bartel was promoted to foreman. Few employees back then lasted that long as working conditions were terrible, Bartel said. With little automation until years later, there was always a large turnover of staff. Very few men became long time members of the staff in the feed division of the company.

As the company moved more and more into automated equipment, staff turnover was greatly reduced, and today, there are a number of 20-year-plus employees.

After five or so years on the job at the mill, Roy went on the road to sell feed. Vernon and Ernest Froese were his first customers, he recalled, and today Steinbach Hatchery is still dealing with the members of the Froese family.

In 1986, Walter Reimer retired and sold Bartel his shares. Reimer financed the deal for a year and then took Roy to the Steinbach Credit Union to help him arrange a loan to pay out the balance.

Bartel became part of an ownership group that included Joel Friesen’s father Jake, who was a salesman with Puratone before leaving that company to join Steinbach Hatchery.

Other partners were the Loewen brothers, Mark and Royden, whose father had also been an earlier shareholder.

Joel Friesen’s career path with Steinbach Hatchery and Feeds has been pretty well the same as Roy Bartel’s, starting with cleaning pullet barns while he was in high school.

In 2016, he joined the company, working the summer between years at the U of M, jumping in at hatchery farms and joining the sales team on the road.

In 2017, after graduation, Joel was full-time in sales and service. Since then he worked his way up the ladder to become the CEO of the company in January of 2025.

Roy, for years was the general manager, but in essence had been the acting CEO for years and will be retiring at the end of this year.

Roy still plans to spend three and a half hours a day acting as the company’s buyer on the commodity market and will continue to be involved with purchasing grain from Steinbach Hatchery customers, as he has been doing for the past 30 to 35 years.

The Barkmans used to take care of that part of the business. Roy says he kind of worked his way into the job as one of the last guys that didn’t sell his shares or leave the company.

Today, in the company’s three branches, hatchery, feed, and farms there are 80 employees.

One of three farms is located just south of Steinbach, a second is in the RM of Tache near the Ridgeville Hutterite Colony, and a third is in the Blumenort area. At the three breeder/layer operations the flocks total 104,000 birds.