Alberta’s feedlot alley is sucking in grain from large parts of western North America, and causing feed users across the Prairies to develop a taste for corn.
“We’ve gone to the States and started to buy corn,” said Ken Richmond of Feed Rite.
“All the feed mills go on a least-cost basis, so if you can import, that’s what happens.”
Unit trains and streams of trucks of corn have been coming across the United States border to fill the demand for feed grains in southern Alberta and the parched western Prairies.
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Usually, only about 350,000 tonnes of U.S. corn are imported annually into Western Canada, but this year it could reach a million tonnes, said Agriculture Canada coarse grains analyst Dennis Jackson.
Western Canada is short about 500,000 tonnes of barley and feed wheat, he said.”The most likely scenario is continued strong imports of corn from the U.S.”
The feed grain deficit in the West won’t seriously harm Ontario and Quebec producers, but it does leave them with one less sourcing option.
Some are already facing higher freight costs because nearby states such as Michigan had small crops. They’ll have to ship corn farther.
Richmond said he has heard rumours that feed grains are being brought in from Europe to Eastern Canada.
“Boat freight is cheap.”
On the Prairies, corn is attractive because of the skyrocketing price of barley and feed wheat.
Corn is often imported into Manitoba, but it costs $15 to $19 more per tonne to import it into Saskatchewan and up to $30 more to get it to Alberta.
“Right now the corn in relation to wheat and barley is advantageous,” said Richmond.
The low Canadian dollar makes it more costly to buy American corn. Agriculture Canada estimates that imports from the U.S.reached 2.7 million tonnes in 2000-01, up 164 percent over the year before. The average in the 1990s was 863,500 tonnes.
It forecasts imports in 2001-02 at 1.9 million tonnes due to lower imports into Eastern Canada but higher imports into the West are the only reasons more isn’t flowing north, he said.
