Todd Lewis is sitting on 60’000 bushels of canary seed that he can’t move. He says he is one of the lucky ones.
“There’s parts of the province that are sitting on half their crop,” Lewis, Agriculture Producers Association of Saskatchewan president, explained. “Certainly in our membership in the northern half of the province shipping has been terrible.”
A grain bottleneck stretching from the west coast across the prairies has Saskatchewan farmers on edge, and with good reason: Lewis estimates between 80 and 90 per cent of the provinces crops are exported. The bottleneck comes as a result of poor rail service, something Canadian National Railway (CN) blames on the cold winter.
“We continually hear about cold weather. Well the railroads have been in this business for 100 years, and I think February is cold this year just like it was 100 years ago. You hear continually about cold snaps and everything, but in reality it’s wintertime in Canada. It’s going to be cold,” Lewis countered.
Last grain week CN shipped just one third of its orders. It’s the worst performance this grain season, and the eighth time they have fulfilled less than 60 per cent of their orders this year.
Canadian Pacific also struggled, supplying just 69 per cent of their weekly orders, but it’s just the third time this year where the railway has failed to deliver less than 80 per cent of their orders.
“The struggles are very predictable, we saw it again that CN was going to have a man and engine shortage and it’s come to fruition,” Lewis lamented.
To date CN has kept 14,255 hopper cars off the track; cars that farmers expected to be available.
The railway told the ministry of agriculture they are working on a solution.
“They’ve admitted they’ve had some problems, they brought new locomotives online, and they’re training new crews right now, but there’s about a six month lag between actually getting the iron on the rail and getting the capacity online.” David Loewen, a strategic policy manager with the Ministry of Agriculture, noted.
The ministry says they aren’t concerned yet, but are closely monitoring the situation.
In the meantime, farmers are facing demurrage fines fined as boats wait for grain to arrive.
“Every dollar we can get out of our commodities we need it in our pockets, it shouldn’t be going to demurrage on boats that are sitting there for no reason at all other than we got bad service out of the rails.”
The 2013 bottleneck cost an estimated $8.3 billion nationwide. Lewis says it set Saskatchewan farmers back years and it’s an experience they aren’t looking to repeat.
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