Grain flowed out of the West Coast with few problems this winter, but no one should be congratulated on that achievement, says a major canola exporter.
“We’ve kind of squeaked this one by,” said Lach Coburn of Cargill in Vancouver.
“Did we get lucky? Yeah, we probably did. That’s not the way to run your business.”
Coburn said booming exports out of Vancouver and Prince Rupert were helped by good weather and a relatively slow Canadian Wheat Board export program.
With the board’s shipments expected to increase in the next few months, the flow of non board commodities through the narrow export pipelines may grow sluggish.
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“I would hate to compete with a heavy board program,” said Coburn, who oversees Cargill’s exports in Vancouver.
“I think we’d be behind, period.”
Winter can be a nightmare for western grain exporters. Frigid weather makes hopper cars harder to haul, so more engines are needed. Storms can close tracks for days, backing up grain all the way to the farmgate, with plugged local elevators.
Competition for car space between wheat board crops and non board crops like canola can leave both sectors fuming at each other. Other commodities such as coal also fight for rail capacity in the crucial months after harvest, when farmers most want to move crops off the farm.
The Canadian rail system has also often been accused of harbouring inefficiencies, which cause the wrong commodities to run down the wrong tracks at the wrong time. That can lead to export terminals being full until ships come in to clear out the crop.
This winter, both west coast ports have been struggling to move one to 1.1 million tonnes per month of crops “but we should be moving 1.4 to 1.5 million tonnes, and we’re not,” said Coburn.
Grain transportation is not an issue that’s going away.
“We can’t get comfortable with this (amount of grain that we have exported this winter), because if we ever had to ramp this up and compete for capacity, there would be a lot of unhappy customers, and that’s not what we want,” said Coburn.
