I think a couple or three points are germane, Mr. Allen.
We don't yet have a really granular visibility on a lot of the grain that is moving in and out of the country through other areas like the St. Lawrence or down south. The minister mentioned that when he talked about the enhancements to the grain monitoring program. We should have much increased visibility on where that grain is going and how much is going. That will be another set of data that will help us forecast what the carry-out will be.
You are quite right that the carry-out is going to be substantial. The minister mentioned that the average is about eight million tonnes. Last year it was only five. The average crop over the last little while is about 55 million tonnes depending on what's planted. This year we had 76 million tonnes, significantly above average.
Let's say we have an average year of 55 million tonnes and we do somewhere between 15 and 20 million tonnes in carry-out. You can see we're still going to be faced with a fairly significant amount of grain. This year has been a learning period in several ways. I think the grain companies will scale their marketing programs sufficiently so they'll be able to calibrate the rail performance better. That's our hope. They've experimented with other means of moving the grain this year and they'll probably explore that. We know that farmers are looking at more permanent storage on farm and also adopting other temporary storage practices and making sure they're moving that grain first.
These are the kinds of considerations we have over the next little while.