Prairie farmers and Mother Nature have done their bit to produce one of the best quality grain crops in years.
Now it’s up to the people who sell, handle and ship that grain to market to fulfill their end of the bargain.
For farmers like Royce Logan, that means seeing lots of rail cars hauling grain out of his local elevator at Plato, in west-central Saskatchewan. But he realizes that’s out of his hands.
“We’ve got the grain in the bin and now it’s just a question of moving it out,” said Logan, who grew wheat, durum, canaryseed and flax on his five quarter-sections. “Hopefully what happened last year won’t happen again.”
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What happened last year was a failure of the grain transportation system that cut 1996-97 grain exports by 1.5 million tonnes and cost farmers $65 million, according to Canadian Wheat Board estimates.
Exactly why that happened has been debated for months and will be the subject of Canadian Transportation Agency hearings next spring.
But as the busy fall shipping season gets into full swing, most people in the grain handling and transportation industry are uttering soothing words about pros-pects for moving this year’s crop to market.
“From what we can see now with the car supply, the locomotive power and the sales on the books, it looks like we should be able to handle things,” said Richard Wansbutter, Saskatchewan Wheat Pool’s vice-president for marketing and transportation.
There are reasons for optimism. The railways have added hopper cars and locomotives to their grain fleets, a strong August and September shipping program has gotten things off to a good start, contingency plans have been put in place and the high quality of the crop makes it easier to sell, handle and ship.
No one wants a repeat of last year’s fiasco, said Greg Arason, chief executive officer of Manitoba Pool Elevators and chair of the Car Allocation Policy Group.
“The industry has come together over the summer and said ‘we don’t want to get into the situation we were in last year, regardless of what the reasons for that were’, ” he said.
Weekly meetings are being held to make sure shipping targets are met and a series of corrective steps have been identified in case problems do arise.
However, some in the industry warn that contingency plans and promises of better performance provide no guarantees to farmers. Too many unexpected things can happen, whether it’s bad weather, labor disputes or equipment breakdowns.
“I’ve started to develop some concerns I didn’t have earlier,” said United Grain Growers president Ted Allen, noting that shipping targets are still being missed too frequently.
He worries that the ongoing CTA battle between the railways and the Canadian Wheat Board is hurting their ability to work together, affecting day-to-day grain shipping operations.
The board says that’s not the case, adding that if the transportation system works properly, farmers can expect their bins to be empty by the end of the crop year next July.
Chief commissioner Lorne Hehn said the intense scrutiny brought on by last year’s problems has made everyone more conscious of doing a good job.
“If anything, it could be positive.”
