They say it's not as bad as 2013....

[bucket]

Klause

Why ....you ask?

[Klause]

Klause

Why ....you ask?

Humour me?

I have a suspicion....




Northgate, G3, ILTA.... vs. the "old crew"...

[bucket]

I used G3 to dump my durum but they are plugged until early next week.

Still not sure how a 35000 tonne elevator gets plugged when a train can be loaded in 24 hours.....something tells me that the politicians and railways struggle with math.

Look if an elevator has 80 percent of their next train in store the train should be on its way there.

But I also think we are short 6000 rail cars and railway competition. ...

[Klause]

Well, there's more to it than loading a train in 24 hours.


You need to blend the crop to match specs... this year it's difficult because there's a lot of tough stuff out.

Often, it also has to be cleaned....


I think there's a difference though, between being "plugged" for 5 days and being "unable to buy for a month because we have no trains scheduled".


And that's kind of what we're seeing here.

I'm not sure if some of these line companies aren't getting sales, or what is happening.

Again, just because ships are sitting at port, do we know if they have been contracted? Often times shipping companies just send empty ships with no current contract to a port where they know there will be work, so they can load and ship faster...




I have a theory that some of our grain cos that blend to minimum standards and try to ship that are seeing lower export business... competition from other countries, and from other grain companies within Canada.


I know this is a common complaint from talking with end-use customers oversees.... They get sent inferior product from us, and get told "well it still makes grade".

In one case I had an owner of a large whole foods chain in Kuwait show me what they got sent for lentils... (reds) stones, sprouts, greens mixed in, weed seeds... If you took it to a terminal here I bet they would have made a 3 maybe.... and this gets shipped overseas for a 2 or better?

There's problems in our supply chain right from where we dump it to the ship it goes into, but there's no will to change anything.... And our supply chain is sacrificing long term health of the industry for short term profit.


I.E. blending a ship load to minimum or sub-par specs, makes them more money on that load, but costs their reputation and more than likely future shipments...


Just my $0.02