Farmers on the prairies have finished taking off a bumper crop for the ages. Now the issue is getting their grain shipped to market.
Farmers across Saskatchewan are patiently waiting to get their grain to elevators. Davidson farmer, Gerrid Gust is frustrated that contracts and promises are not being kept.
“You think you’re signing a September contract,” explained Gust, “but they’ve got 90 days after the end of September to get it in. It’s in the fine print, everyone knows it’s there. But no one hopes to use those fine clauses.”
Gust has said that he is not as bad off this year as other farmers. Some of his contracts are about three weeks behind the scheduled delivery date, which isn’t bad considering the prairies did have a record-breaking crop. This record crop has led to backed up elevators and a shortage of rail cars.
CN Rail ramped up production to over 5,000 rail cars a week to elevators. A CN Spokesperson told CTV News that they have heard farmers loud and clear, but that it’s not as simple as it sounds.
“Farmers have been saying, very, very loud and clear, ‘Put more cars in the supply chain’,” said Jim Feeny, a CN Rail Spokesperson. “But based on our experience, we don’t think that would work. The result would be, you would just jam the system up and slow down overall movement.”
CN Rail said that the backup is everyone’s responsibility to work through, but things are getting done.
“Progress is being made,” said Feeny. “The supply chain has a certain amount of capacity that is built into it and it takes time, it takes physical time to move a crop.”
While the supply chain works through the kinks of the record crop coming in, farmers are left in a tough spot. With nine months of bills that have piled up, payday is still on hold.
“It affects families,” said Gust. “We chase after our kids hockey teams, we got dancers, we’ve got wives that are working. Everything is just sort of compressed into this winter window.”
The bottleneck continues on the prairies, with no real end in sight.
