Quorum Corp.’s annual report looking at 2021-22 outlines a litany of challenges that affected grain movement that year
“Not your typical year.”
That, in a nutshell, is how the president of Quorum Corp. described Canada’s 2021-22 crop year.
Mark Hemmes, whose company is contracted to manage the federal government’s Grain Monitoring Program, characterized it as a year of widespread drought on the Prairies and floods in British Columbia that disrupted efforts to move an undersized Canadian crop to market.
“It really wasn’t representative of what a normal year is,” he said.
“We started the crop year trying to recover from the (impact of) forest fires but as soon as things started to get rolling, we ended up with massive flooding down in B.C.’s Fraser Valley, which really messed things up for months and months.”
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In a recent interview with The Western Producer, Hemmes called the 2021-22 crop year “a debacle.”
Although railways rehabilitated their flood-damaged railway lines in 14 or 15 days, it took months for the flow of traffic to get back to a normal state.
“We saw average car-cycle times higher than we’d seen in 20 years. The flow of grain into port was really affected all the way into March.”
Before the B.C. floods, drought-stricken prairie producers harvested their smallest crop in years, pushing the total grain supply (new production plus carry-out inventories) to around 56.6 million tonnes, down 35 percent from a year earlier.
From a grain-handling and transportation perspective, that would normally suggest a low-pressure year from railway companies and shippers.
But the flooding in B.C.’s Lower Mainland brought grain-handling efforts to a screeching halt.
“The only saving grace, if you can call it that, was that there was a (prairie) drought and we were moving 40 percent less grain than we would have in a normal crop year,” Hemmes said.
In a normal production year, the outcome could have been catastrophic, he added.
Details of the 2021-22 crop year are contained in Quorum’s annual report of the Canadian grain-handling and transportation system.
The report, available online at grainmonitor.ca, was posted on March 22.
Other highlights from the report include:
- A 39 percent year-over-year decline in western Canadian crop production to 49 million tonnes, representing the smallest crop recorded by the GMP since 2007-08.
- A 36 percent reduction in primary elevator throughput to 34.4 million tonnes, the lowest volume recorded in a decade.
- A 45.7 percent reduction in terminal elevator throughput to 24.3 million tonnes.
- A 41 percent decline in grain shipments by rail to 36.4 million tonnes, including 27.5 million tonnes to western Canadian destinations.
- A 57.1 percent year-over-year decrease in containerized grain traffic to 2.4 million tonnes.
According to the GMP’s annual report, it took an average of 61.6 days for grain to move from the Prairies to export positions in Western Canada. That represented a 46 percent increase over the 42.2-day average posted a year earlier.
The amount of time that delivered grain spent in storage was also up.
On average, the time that delivered grain spent in storage rose in 2021-22 by 12.9 days at country elevators and 6.7 days at export terminals.
In anticipation of a smaller prairie crop, railway companies also placed a larger-than-usual number of grain hopper cars into storage.
“At the outset of the 2021-22 crop year, just under half of (the railways’) combined fleet was reported to be in active service,” the annual report said.
Slower car cycle times in the first quarter of the 2021-22 shipping season — up to 15.9 days in the first quarter of 2021-22 from 14.7 days a year earlier — resulted in rising grain inventories at country elevators and longer storage times.
However, those delays paled compared to the problems that emerged a few weeks later, when widespread flooding in British Columbia washed out dikes, roads, bridges and railway infrastructure throughout the Fraser River Valley.
“The scope of the damage was unprecedented and severed the essential road and rail arteries leading into and out of Vancouver,” the country’s busiest marine port, the report said.
“And although CN and CP were able to rebuild their heavily damaged routes within weeks of November’s disastrous rainfalls, the attendant service outage backlogged the flow of grain and other traffic well into the opening months of 2022.”
Not surprisingly, the average amount of time required for prairie grain to move through the system rose dramatically, reaching a high of 75.9 days in early 2022.
Country elevator storage times also reached a record 54.6 days and average car cycle times rose to an unprecedented 25.6 days.
As bad as it was, the 2021-22 shipping season, at least from a grain-handling and transportation perspective, could have ended a lot worse, Hemmes said.
With a normal-sized crop, “it would have been an economic catastrophe,” he said.
“It was already a catastrophe, especially for the people living in the Fraser Valley, but it could have been far, far worse for the grain industry.”
Hemmes said the 2022-23 shipping season, when compared to last year’s snafu, has been a walk in the park.
But meaningful comparisons of grain-handling system performance would never use 2021-22 as a benchmark, he added.
“It’s not something that I would say would fall into any meaningful calculation or benchmark for system performance.”
