CN's assistant vice president of grain David Przednowek says as a result they're watching what's happening with crop development and taking that into account when trying to determine new crop movement.
He says last year, they implemented a lot of operational changes that delivered really strong consistent grain movement and this year is an opportunity to refine the plan and tweak it.
"You know, we're still recording the best velocity and train speed that we've seen in years. And we want to build on the strengths of last year's changes to our operational plan to deliver strong and consistent grain movement this fall again."
CN will be releasing its 2023-24 grain plan at the end of July.
Meantime, the seasonal slowdown in grain movement on the railways continues with a large volume of the 2022 grain crop already moved and farmers busy in the fields.
He says in the last few weeks they've seen less than half of the grain supply chain capacity that's available for movement being utilized.
"We've seen a bit of a recovery in demand here in June, but if you go back and look at week 45, it was less than 50 per cent of supply chain utilization. A slower pace of farmer deliveries, and there's less and less grain available to move each week as we get deeper into the season."
He says they've heard anecdotally that with commodity prices, having done what they've done here over the past number of weeks, that's resulted in slower farmer selling.
The slower grain movement may have come at a good time with the wildfire situation impacting some of the rail line movement.
He notes in Alberta recently they had to temporarily halt movement on CN's Edson subdivision due to the wildfire situation.
Przednowek says something else on his radar right now is the Federal Government's plans to set up a Transportation Supply Chain Office.
It was one of the line items in the Federal Budget.
The concept is that it will work in collaboration with industry to respond to disruptions and better coordinate action to increase the capacity, efficiency, and reliability of the supply chain.
He says if it's done right it could play an important role.
"If this supply chain office really gets into the true end-to-end aspects of the business, I think that'll be a real improvement. Instead of just continually focusing on we need more and more data and the data that we focus on is simply railway-related data, which is the wrong way to look at it."
Przednowek says they need to look at the whole supply chain from when the grain truck leaves the farm to the processing facility or grain terminal, to the rail car, port facility and finally getting it loaded on the boat and the impact of how rain at the port delays the whole operation.
To hear Glenda-Lee's conversation with CN's assistant vice president of grain David Przednowek click on the link below.