Lack of Grain Movement A Growing Concern

The Ag Transport Coalition numbers paint a pretty bleek picture of grain movement so far.

Weyburn area farmer, Jake Leguee is Vice President of SaskWheat and is concerned by the numbers he's seeing.

The ATC numbers show CN and CP supplied a combined 57 per cent of hopper cars ordered in Grain Week 24.

Leguee says there was a drop in grain movement following the flooding in BC, which was to be expected, but it's weeks later, and we're not seeing much improvement.

"You know , you kind of have to ask the question. Why are they still having so much trouble getting grain moved? Yeah, we've had some bitter cold, and that sort of thing, but thats standard winter stuff. I think that they should be able to handle that."

He says the thing that's most frustrating about all of this is we had a small crop.

"We expect total metric tonnes hauled to be down, but car order fulfillment. I mean, this should have been a year for them to do really well on that, even with the flood. The crop that Western Canada produced was not large. There's no reason they shouldn't be able to keep up with capacity, even with all the other challenges that they're facing."

He says railway performance is stunningly bad, and the situation is resulting in a backlog at the ports, to the point where there's not enough room in the harbour.

"So that should tell us something about the fact that the railways aren't keeping up with what exporters are demanding from Canada. The demurrage costs at this point have got to be absolutely astronomical. And we know that those costs eventually will work your way through the system down our way. So, you know, one way or another we're paying for this."

According to the Weekly Performance Update from the Ag Transport Coalition:

CN order fulfillment performance has now declined for six consecutive weeks, from 68% in week 19 to the 24% seen in week 24. In addition, CN has now failed to supply shippers with at least 80% of cars ordered on time for 9 consecutive weeks. CP saw much improved performance this week in supplying 83% of shipper orders for week 24 on time - an improvement from less than 60% in each of the previous three weeks and above the 80% threshold for the first time in 8 weeks. CN and CP combined will enter week 25 with 3,220 outstanding cars - a net 9% decline (-301) from the 3,521 cars outstanding at the end of last week. The change in the outstanding car count represents a decrease in the number of outstanding hopper cars on both CN by (-70) and CP by (-231), respectively.