As has been pointed out, agriculture is tied very closely to transportation, regardless of whether it's rail or truck or containerized shipments, and vessels as well. It's all about getting it to the consumer in a timely basis and a competitive level.
I recollect that years ago we had some serious issues with our railroads back in the days when CN Rail was a crown corporation. It was losing money, bleeding profusely in the pocketbook, and there were moves afoot to change that.
We as an industry certainly don't oppose the fact that our railroads should be profitable. That's certainly important to maintain the infrastructure and so on that's required. However, it appears to us in the last number of years, and I don't recall exactly when this was put in place, that firstly CN Rail became a private corporation and the railroads were not under the transportation guidelines as they once were. Just from the outside looking in, to us as an industry it's very apparent that the two railroads in Canada really consider their shareholders as their customers, as opposed to the shippers and the consignees of this country and elsewhere.
I'll cite one example here, and this is maybe just a small one, but a local hog farmer down the road from me decided three years ago that he was going to venture into organic pork production because he felt he could make a far greater return going that way into a specific niche market. He had to rely on securing some organic grains from Saskatchewan, and of course there's a producer car program that the organic grain producer in Saskatchewan would sell his grain to this particular hog farmer and have the railroad send this producer car to Ontario. So it allowed him to make some feed. He's begged and pleaded with me, this hog farmer has, to try to help him move some of these products in a timely basis. He's waited as long as six months for delivery of some items, for grains, particularly barley out of Saskatchewan, to be able to feed these hogs.
He's at a loss for what to do. He felt that the decision he made to go organic was a wise one and that it was certainly going to be a profitable and sustainable operation for his family. We're trying to work together with some trucking companies, as odd as it sounds, to try to move some grain from Saskatchewan by truck to Ontario to be able to facilitate his feed needs.
Essentially we're told week after week after week.... Let me just back up for a minute. We felt many years ago that it was in our best interest as a small company to work as closely as we could with some of the mainline elevator chains in western Canada, thinking that the railroads obviously would pay more attention to their transportation departments than a company in Ontario. What I've explained to you earlier is all that's fed to us from these mainline elevator companies in western Canada. And essentially regardless of who you are, whether you're James Richardson, or Cargill, or whoever you are, it's irrelevant. The railroads are demanding that if you want to move grain, they'll accept 100-car shipments to the west coast, and if it's anything different from that, sorry, we can't provide you with any equipment.