EMERGENCY RISK REDUCTION

How easy it is to forget what was involved in getting that bagel or slice of toast on your plate this morning!  Ok, for most of us, we never have really known its complexity. Surely this is true of my 14 and 16 year old teenagers. If they could get their noses out of their ‘screens’! At least  long enough to look at the amazing selection in our nearby grocery stores. We are so accustomed to grabbing a box, bag, or loaf, tossing it into our cart, through checkout, unloaded at the kitchen counter, and soon onto the table.  Welcome to 21st century version of hunting and gathering!

I must sound like an old fogie here, rocking in my chair, and thinking of the good ole days — long ones, I might add — growing up on a dairy in South Carolina. All of that is true, but my real reason for contemplation is a current project on which I am working. I am examining the possible impacts and prevention measures of a feed grain disruption on poultry and livestock producers in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia. It’s another very interesting study — prompted by events that began in early 2013, far away on the Canada prairies. Events that were virtually unnoticed by the consumer. Briefly:

Some of the best wheat is grown in Canada, and it’s sought after worldwide. Weather conditions were ideal in early 2013 in Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Manitoba, and a record-breaking, high quality crop of food-grade wheat resulted. So much that many grain elevators were overflowing — literally. Wheat is dominated here by a few large grain companies, who contracted the wheat for export markets, primarily Asia. One small consideration – a bit overlooked – was getting this bumper harvest to the Pacific ports, for loading onto ships. Trains are the traditional carriers for bulk grains.

So what does this have to do with a feed grain shortage for some Fraser Valley livestock farmers?  There was a bumper harvest of grain, right? Yes, but consider the following.  The grain companies had lucrative export contracts to fulfill. Trains were committed to move this grain to the ship terminals. Government heard the cries of the farmers, concerned that their grain was ruining due to limited storage, and put quotas on the railways to move it, or get fined. The trains had to run as efficiently as possible, which was to send full trainloads of hopper cars from prairies directly to the port and back again for another round trip.

Ironically, hundreds of trainloads with grain heading to the Vancouver port were passing feed mills in the Fraser Valley. By early 2014, the mills were scrambling to find enough grain of any quality to grind for their customers — mostly dairymen, poultry producers, and swine farmers. Of course, the shopping mom in the dairy section of the grocery didn’t see empty shelves, because there weren’t any. But there could have been.

Usually, we think of a disruption as resulting from a shortage, often from a natural disaster. Here’s the irony. The disruption of wheat for the farmers near Vancouver was because of a bumper crop in the Canadian prairies.  It had to be moved…to the ports…with allegedly no time to bring relatively small amounts to feed mills. Yes, it was a disaster of sorts. But none like I’ve witnessed before.

The example shows how we are incredibly linked in this food chain, or ‘web’, as it’s appropriately called, since we are caught in it. I have written before that we should start with little things — plant a little, adjust our lifestyles a little, simplify life a little — in order to become slightly better prepared, if one link in that massive food chain snaps. A word we might all heed, including myself.

Monty