Grain production and marketing is a time-sensitive business in Canada. Field crops are grown in a window of less than 150 days. Price is often based on delivery timeliness and anyone who has ever grown Canadian Wheat Board grains is familiar with demurrage costs that cut into the bottom line. Computers quietly form the backbone of the entire system. In the year 2000 those computers may fall silent.
“We have 17 operating systems, 10 computer languages, 60,000 programs and 36 million lines of computer code to change and test. It is a major issue,” said Mary Jane Skulski, of CN Rail.
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Many computer systems designed and built in the past two decades are not able to deal with the year 2000. When their two-digit clocks flip from 99 to 00 on midnight 2000 nearly every sector of society will see computer failures, say experts. Agriculture will be one the most heavily affected areas.
Kerry Hawkins, president of Cargill in Canada, agreed it will be a problem.
“We do 70 percent of our crop protection business in a 20 to 60 day period in the spring. If our suppliers don’t deliver on orders and Cargill doesn’t ship to farmers on time, the narrow window of opportunity for planting the year’s crops will pass. It will impact on farmers, businesses and have an extreme impact on the food supply. The same problems exist on the marking side,” said Hawkins.
He told reporters last week that not all agriculture businesses will be ready. In fact only 33 percent of Canadian companies in primary production, such as farming, mining, logging and fishing, have taken steps to deal with it.
But the major grain companies, railroads and ports have taken seriously the challenge of how to upgrade computer systems and the embedded chips that act as tiny computer controls. The Canadian Wheat Board and the Canadian Grain Commission have been working on the issue since 1995. Each player is dependent on the other to be ready when the clock ticks to 2000.
“We have 30 accredited exporters to check out. Hundreds of other suppliers and clients and we depend on each of them to have their systems in place in advance of the end of 1999,” said Rhea Yates, of the Canadian Wheat Board.
“The board is concerned about all of us. We are working with them to ensure that data interchange and every other issue we share is dealt with,” said Richard Willacky, of Manitoba Pool Elevators.
Pressure from the banks and financial trading organizations such as commodity markets and brokerages that trade the stocks of grain companies is mounting.
“We have to be able to assure traders that our company is not going to be at risk. They need to know before they recommend our stocks,” said Saskatchewan Wheat Pool’s Malcolm Corner.
While none of the major players in the grain industry will discuss the costs of upgrading, aging of data (the term used for a test that convinces the computers that 2000 has already arrived) and software testing, estimates are in the low hundreds of millions of dollars for this sector alone.
Manitoba Pool Elevators and Alberta Wheat Pool got a later start than some of the other grain companies in 1997, but feel their deadlines, beginning Jan. 1, 1999 will be met.
“We hope we are going to find them (problems) all, but we know there will be a very few we miss. We are preparing for that as well,” said Dave Riddell, of Alberta Wheat Pool.
Corner, who is in charge of the year 2000 project for Sask Pool, has had 13 staff working on the case since May 1996. Their target is Dec. 31, 1998.
“We will need time to test for all the got-yas that will be in the system. You hope to find everything the first time but that won’t happen. You need to test everything.”
Pioneer Grain began its upgrade in 1996, a three-year plan that Patrick Van Osh feels will be met.
“Each one of the major players will be ready in time. No one can expect to find everything. We have to be realistic. But each of us is taking it very seriously and although we all expect a few little problems we all will be as ready for the year 2000 as it is possible to be,” he said.
Little things can create large problems. Embedded chips in machines such as elevator scales and grain terminal controls require special techniques to repair. Often the controls will require replacement or physical repair, said Willacky.
Cargill began its program in late 1996 and was surprised by the extent of the problem with software that was permanently burned into embedded computer chips, said Hawkins.
Still, Canada’s major agricultural and transportation players appear confident they can beat the bug.
