Ever want to spend a day engaged in discussions of “empty order fulfillment,” rail car unload targets and other arcane measures of grain transportation performance?
If so, you should attend the Fields on Wheels conference that is held every year in Winnipeg. It’s a one-day event that brings together railway managers, grain company officials, grain shippers, grain buyers, a few farmer representatives and at least a couple of scribblers from farm newspapers, like me. There’s no better window into the inner workings of the grain transportation system, so if you want to do more than simply gripe about how rotten the railways, the Canadian Wheat Board and grain companies are, but actually want to be able to complain from a position of some knowledge, consider attending Fields on Wheels. It’s put on by the University of Manitoba’ s Transport Institute every year – I believe it was the 14th annual convention I was at last week – and almost everything discussed is directly relevant to farmers. This creates two crises for a reporter like me: 1) what do I ignore and what do I do a story on, because there’s far, far too much to cram into the newspaper; 2) how the heck does the grain transportation system work, anyway? Wandering in to the conference last week, holding a coffee and an Egg McMuffin, I was immediately confronted by terms like “empty order fulfillment” and had to try to revive those atrophied parts of my brain that store my understanding of the complexities of grain transportation. After 15 years at this paper, and after attending dozens of conferences like this, I find my grasp of the grain transportation system to be still primitive. Unlike my colleague Adrian Ewins, who knows this stuff like he knows Montreal Canadiens history, 
and unlike a colleague from a competing newspaper who was also at the conference,
who swims through these seas of complexity like the Man From Atlantis, I feel like a beached whale trying to find waters I can float in, and a bit like Noah after all that grape juice: naked and shamefully exposed in my ignorance. 
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Yet after the coffee kicks in, the McMuffin activates and my internal search mechanism finds those dusty bits of grain transportation knowledge, all the stats and concepts and the discussions begin to make sense, and a strange level of understanding takes over, and by the end of the morning, I’m cheerily thinking about port congestion and the implications of the Panama canal’s expansion on internal North American rail movement and wondering just how fast the railways can turn around a railcar and get it back to a mid-prairie point and was 2008-09’s performance just a factor last year of smaller potash and coal shipments . . .
After a couple of hours, it all seems to make sense again.
There are lots of odd structures with arcane vocabularies – like the grain transportation system – that have a huge impact on farmers’ net returns but take a lot of commitment to understand. The farmer reps at these types of conferences are doing that job of giving farmers an eye on a stunningly complex system, which is also what we reporters try to do through our printed scribblings. I must say I’m always impressed at just how well the invisible hand of the regulated marketplace seems to be working in these many-player industries. Sure, there are lots of problems in any industry, but my cynicism is always challenged by the debate around industry issues that takes over at events like Fields on Wheels. Railway officials seem to be willing to discuss their failings and hopes and don’t appear too offended when the farm reps point out their apparent flaws. The grain companies, CWB and railways challenge each other and put each other on the spot in a polite manner, as at an academic thesis defence. Then everyone goes for drinks, or at least some do.
In this week’s paper (the one out Thursday) I wrote a story about one such grain transportation-themed chat over drinks that Barry Prentice, the Transport Institute head, and Mark Hemmes, the leading grain transportation analyst in Canada, had a few years ago, when they found they had completely opposite views on whether containerization of grain shipments would become the dominant form of movement, or never more than a tiny sideshow. I won’t detail what their views were, because that’s in the story in the paper, but what I found most interesting was that two nationally-acknowledged experts in grain transportation – having access to most of the same data and each having decades of experience – could have such wildly opposing views. I found them happily chatting after Prentice had chaired a session in which Hemmes gave a presentation. They’re still buddies, and still totally disagree in their views on containerization.
I found this refeshing, because so often people are troubled, discombobulated, perturbed by divergences of opinions with friends. They have trouble accepting that two intelligent people can look at the same information and come out with completely divergent views without one being corrupted by some nasty form of self-interest, of moral corruption. There’s too little acceptance of honest disagreement. Too many people suffer from the general outlook of the talking heads on Fox News: everyone that disagrees with us is stupid, evil or arrogantly disconnected. Not much room for “Well, maybe they have a point and perhaps I’ll be proven wrong in the end.” Perhaps this discomfort with disagreement is no new thing. I recall a time in 1982, when I was in Grade 10, when my social studies teacher made me – at the time an unabashed Thatcherite – and a friend who sat beside me in class – a communist – explain to our classmates that our often loud and animated arguments were not a sign of dislike for each other, but just a sign of independent minds enjoying jousting with each other. Eventually our amiable arguments graduated with us from high school and into the pubs. And we never came to blows.
I’m not so naive as to think that the various interests at these sorts of conferences don’t think uncharitable things about each other. The grain company folks seem to feel the railways and CWB are making their job harder than it has to be and don’t care how they jig the system around in the pursuit of their own self interest. The CWB folks seem suspicious of the grain companies and unimpressed by railway claims of good performance. The railway folks sometimes have a tone of breezy indifference to everyone else’s concerns and one senses they consider everyone else in the room to be a bit of a dunce. And the farmer reps sometimes seem convinced that no-one gives a hoot about the farmer.
But underneath the partisan interests there is a surprising commitment among these folks to making the system work, and the keen eyes of the various parties – and the action of regulators – keeps the various self-interests working towards a better whole. It’s a nice example of the invisible hand of the (regulated) marketplace working for what we all hope is the benefit of farmers. No doubt no one thinks it’s working fantastically well. But that dissatisfaction of all is what puts the pressure on the system to improve.
