More pay coming | Great Plains owner vows to pay outstanding amounts owed to producers in 60 days
A main player in the camelina industry is again reneging on contracts it signed with growers.
Great Plains — The Camelina Company has run into financial difficulties preventing it from fully reimbursing producers for crop they contracted with the company in 2009 and 2010 and grew in 2010 and 2011.
Dan Gray, a farmer from Dewberry, Alta., is one grower awaiting payment on the 140 acres of camelina he grew in 2011.
He received a cheque from the Cincinnati, Ohio, company for $7,296 in October 2011. A balance of $2,043 was supposed to be paid no later than Jan. 31, 2012, but the money has not arrived.
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It is not a big dollar figure but the experience has soured Gray on the highly touted new oilseed crop.
“I’d certainly caution anybody about growing it. It’s difficult to grow and then when you run into this, it makes it worse,” he said.
Great Plains president Sam Huttenbauer said his company has paid growers a minimum of 80 percent of what they were due for crop grown in 2010 and 2011, an amount totalling about $4 million.
Trying to get a new crop off the ground has proven more difficult than anticipated, especially given the tough economic environment in which the U.S. government keeps withholding the blender’s tax credit for biodiesel.
The troubles for Great Plains came to a head in the spring of 2011 when the company was attempting to ship 130 rail cars of its Canadian camelina to a processor in Minnesota.
Record rains caused road bans and shut down some rail traffic. Great Plains couldn’t get a portion of the product it contracted to the facility in the agreed upon time frame. That reduced processing margins.
“We’ve been trying to organize a follow-up crush run but have been hindered in that,” said Huttenbauer.
He claims the company has arranged the necessary financing to pay growers the remaining 20 percent they are owed within the next 60 days.
Gray isn’t holding his breath. He has heard similar assurances before.
His annoyance with the company extends beyond the delayed payment. He said camelina proved to be a difficult crop to work with due to its tiny seed and straw that is as hard to deal with as flax straw.
But he was especially irritated when Great Plains hit him with 44 percent dockage on the 2,800 bushels of camelina that he shipped to the company.
“I mean, it was weedy, but it wasn’t that weedy,” said Gray.
Even if he gets paid the remainder of what he is owed, it won’t cover the cost of production for growing the crop.
“I certainly will never grow it again. I know that much.”
Huttenbauer understands the grower frustration with the crop. It extends in part from a lack of experience planting and harvesting the oilseed.
He said dockage is usually in the eight to 10 percent range but he has seen some dirty crops that he suspects contained some material from the bottom of growers’ bins. If there is a dispute over dockage, the company sends the sample to a lab for a second opinion.
Huttenbauer recognizes it has been a less than ideal launch for camelina in Canada.
“It is our promise to do better and to learn from this,” he said.
Huttenbauer has devoted eight years of his life to developing the crop, the last three years without compensation.
There have been challenges but also some rewards, such as seeing camelina power six months of commercial flights in Europe and watching the crop survive a severe drought in Spain while other non-irrigated crops are withering and dying.
