Every year when I travel down to the World Pork Expo I tarry in North Dakota, Minnesota and rural Iowa. It’s my annual chance to see what’s going on in North Dakota farm country, in the American grain industry centred in Minneapolis, in the U.S. Midwest. It’s my chance to gather materials and explore ideas I’ve been wondering about but don’t want to explore by phone, which is my normal method of travel.
It’s also my chance to immerse myself in continental integration, something that is key to understanding our (Canadian) place in a big North American economy and geography.
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Intellectually I know that southern Manitoba’s Red River valley is essentially the end of the U.S. Midwest, with similar land, environment, farming possibilities. It also seems Midwestern, where you’re more likely to find a lot of industry mixed into small towns and knitted into rural communities than anywhere west of the valley, and where if somebody has a radio playing in a store or restaurant it’s probably playing rock’n’roll rather than country music.
But it’s only by sailing through and around that flow of land, environment and geography that I get a profound feel for how true that reality is. Winnipeg seems a terminus, a beginning, a bookend to those two regions – the Midwest and the Prairies. Depending on which way I look at it, Winnipeg seems like the beginning of both the Midwest and the Prairies, or where those regions run out of road and crash into the wilderness. But it’s a unique location from which to look at both regions and while I’m always thinking of my connection to the Prairies (I am a Regina boy, after all), the Midwest is much less in my mind. So this annual trip is part of righting that balance and refocusing my reporting.
With that preamble out of the way, I thought I’d note some of the continental integration and human-created non-integration that I witnessed and explored on my trip:
* The Rout of Prairie Crops: For the past couple of trips I’ve met with eastern North Dakota wheat growers and industry people to discuss the catastrophic failure of traditional prairie crops to hold their acreage against the onslaught of corn and soybeans. The corn/soybeans advance been unrelenting, wiping out almost all the acreage of oats, barley and flax, and making spring wheat a semi-rare sight in an area that used to be considered the heart of wheat country. This trip I met famers in North Dakota and Minnesota who still grow wheat, but do it mostly for rotation reasons. In the next few weeks I’m going to develop some features or a special report out of this, to be written with the subtext of: What’s happening down there is likely to be happening up here in a few years, and already is in Manitoba’s butt-end of the Red River valley. What reality is coming our way?
* Grain System integration: With the CWB monopoly gone, it seems absurd to have distinct Canadian and U.S. grain industries, elevator systems, anything that would impede the most efficient (and lowest cost) flow of crops out of and through western North America. North American farmers sell into a world economy, yet here in the west we have the prairies sliced into two pieces and have regulations that stop the grain flowing where it most sensibly should. That costs everybody. When I was down in North Dakota I heard about problems farmers south of the line have with delivering grain to Canadian elevators because of grading regs. Up here in Canada I’ve heard farmers complain that many U.S. elevators won’t take Canadian grains out of a nativist bias. When I was down in Minneapolis I visited CHS, the big U.S. cooperative grain elevator and supply company, and they told me they’d like to get into the prairie market since they are heavily invested across Minnesota, North Dakota and Montana, and might try to have a cooperative element to what they do in Canada. Wouldn’t that be a nice addition to the prairie roster of marketing options for farmers? New player, revived coop option. Be nice if Canadian-based players like Richardson and Glencore could expand south simply without many border complications, investing where it makes most sense for their continental systems and to be able to expand southwards without having to establish another different system. But I get the sense ironing out the wrinkles in this thing, one way or another, is going to be a many, many years thing. And I’ll be writing about it forever.
* Slightly severed ties in the North American hog industry: The World Pork Expo is still teeming with Canadians, either in the form of farmers attending to connect with the continental industry or as suppliers promoting their wares and services. The trade show has a heavy, heavy presence of Canadians, which makes sense because we’re a vital part of the North American industry. That part has been reduced by COOL, of course, and if the U.S. government continues its recalcitrant ways and worsens COOL, then that part will probably shrink more. Slightly disheartening for me as a Canuck was to find COOL being such a small concern at the show. It’s a huge deal for the Canadian industry, and often the U.S. industry at this show has loudly debated the issue, but this year COOL was swept under the rug, as farmers and industry showed much more interest in free trade with Europe, with the Trans Pacific Partnership, with porcine diarrhea. COOL just isn’t top-of-mind now to most folks in the American hog industry because it’s been around and everyone down there has adapted. The continental pull is too strong to cut Canada out of the North American industry, but the integration has weakened.
* Weather: I travelled down in crappy weather, with greyness and rain all the way from Winnipeg to Fargo. Not a machine moving. That first night the weather in Fargo was unsettled and I developed a foggy, clothy, sludgy migraine that didn’t leave me for two weeks. Unsettled, tortured weather prevailed over North Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa the entire time I was in the U.S., and when I crossed back to Canuckistan the same weather was here and held sway for a few more days, as did my migraines and foggy-headedness. If you want proof that the Midwest, the U.S. Great Plains and the Canadian Prairies are profoundly integrated, take the weather as testimony. When it’s crappy down there, it’s likely to be crappy up here, sooner or later. Sometimes we get it first, sometimes they do. But eventually most of it integrates and we get continental weather.
