Reading Time: 5 minutes Ottawa has long been in the business of trying to fix the problem of transporting Prairie grain to the west coast by rail. Yet the issues don’t get solved. “None of the policies introduced by Raitt or Ritz did anything to deal with the surge,” University of Manitoba’s Barry Prentice says. “Worse, they have done […] Read more
Could containers be the answer to the West’s grain shipping woes?
A containerized grain supply chain would enhance competition, says University of Manitoba economist
Plenty of blame to go around for grain shipping debacle
A year into the great grain fiasco, it’s no longer only about the railways
Reading Time: 6 minutes UPDATED, June 21, 2015: The 2013 harvest should have been a time of wild celebration. Prairie farmers had produced a bin-busting crop with a record-smashing 76 million tonnes, and with good crop prices, the entire West should have struck up the music and started to dance. Instead, logistics turned the dream into a nightmare, and […] Read more
Editor’s Desk: Getting rail back on the political agenda
Reading Time: 2 minutes John Diefenbaker was no longer Prime Minister when I got to shake his hand. Still, there was an election in the air, and my father, who distrusted Liberals every bit as much Dief (especially when they were led by Pierre Trudeau) had hauled his four boys to the high school auditorium to hear the great […] Read more
The Journey: A quick history of shipping grain to port by rail
From Prairie farm to ocean port, our rail lines still shock the imagination with their engineering and bravado
Reading Time: 9 minutes It’s a trip that is so formidable, it weakened the knees of generations of politicians, entrepreneurs and engineers alike. Everybody could tell the northern Great Plains would be an ideal place for growing cereal crops, and they knew too that the world would love to eat what we grow, but getting those crops to port […] Read more
PHOTOS: Trains, mountains, and a marvel of engineering
Engineers have literally moved mountains to ship goods across Canada
Reading Time: < 1 minute Canada created a rail system that in turn created the country, and keeps creating the West today. If it too rarely gets called one of the wonders of the world, that only shows how poorly we understand it.
Moving Canadian products to China – by railway
Is it really so impossible to think about a rail line linking Canada with the economic hubs of Asia?
Reading Time: 6 minutes What if Canadian farmers had a choice of more than just CN and CP rail to move their grain? Imagine the opportunities our agriculture would have if we weren’t restricted because of the limited trackage to the coasts, a shortage of hopper cars, a lack of pulling power, and increasing competition from oil and other […] Read more
Grain wreck: Weaknesses in the freight system
The big crop and awful winter weren’t the only causes of 2014’s rail fiasco, says transport expert Mark Hemmes. There are also deep systemic issues that must be resolved
Reading Time: 3 minutes If there’s anyone out there with a bird’s eye view of the rail system and exactly what happened last winter, it’s Quorum Corporation’s Mark Hemmes. The organization is the federally appointed monitor of grain transportation, charged with tracking how efficiently grain is moved out of the Prairies following partial deregulation of grain transportation around the […] Read more
Australia’s approach to grain co-ops
Owned by 4,200 farmers, the giant CBH Group adds a whole new dimension to phrases like value-adding and diversification
Reading Time: 6 minutes Given the demise of the prairie pools and the recent sales of a number of Canada’s new-generation co-operative grain terminals, it would be understandable if many Canadian farmers, grain traders, farm advisers and policy makers believe co-operative grain marketing ventures are simply not viable in today’s world. Just don’t try and tell that to Western […] Read more
Opportunities in grain marketing
In a tough market, everyone says “shop your grain around.” But what’s the best way to do that?
Reading Time: 5 minutes With strong grain prices over the past few years, marketing has been relatively easy. Sure, there’s been the perennial question of whether the market will go higher or lower. But finding profitable prices wasn’t exactly searching for a needle in a haystack. As long as they got the yield in the field, profits were largely […] Read more
Churchill enjoys busy shipping year
Reading Time: < 1 minute Churchill is nearing the end of a busy grain shipping season, with the tonnage moving through the northern port expected to come in well above the previous year. “We’ll be wrapping up in the next 10 to 12 days,” Darcy Brede, president and chief operating officer of OmniTRAX, said last week. More than 500,000 tonnes […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
