CN strike cut vital propane supply to farm country
ST. ISIDORE, Ont. – Weary bones does the harvest make, so thus comes Markus Haerle across the puddled yard, wearing mucky rubber boots, a snug little toque, dirt-caked hands and about a week of hard-won whiskers.
And out front, along St. Isidore Road — because it only pours — there is a contractor fixing a sinking foundation on the farmhouse, a side problem he needs right now like a hole in the head.
“Personally,” says the president of Grain Farmers of Ontario, “it was like a bomb went off in front of my face.”
The bomb was the national CN Rail strike, which began Nov. 19. The collateral damage, “in his face”, was the stoppage in the propane supply to much of Eastern Ontario, where 330,000 acres of corn were planted in 2019, including 68,000 right here in PrescottRussell.
“I was up for days and days, with one or two hours sleep. It was not knowing what the future brings.”
Larger producers like Haerle, 51, who plants 2,000 acres with his two sons, have their own commercial dryers, where moist corn off the fields is dried down so it can be stored in giant bins for weeks or months.
(The fresh corn, at 25 to 30 per cent moisture, is dried down to about 15 per cent, otherwise it will rot and ferment sitting in a pile for days on end.)
These are massive mechanical “dryers,” like an outdoor elevator shaft, and they run on propane — a necessity in this part of rural Ontario that is not served by piped natural gas. No gas, no heat, no dryer.
Just as harvest was ending this fall, farmers across Eastern Ontario were coping with the news that out-of-service rail cars would not be carrying the gas to depots in Montreal. Within days, a crisis was forming.
Haerle said his phone soon started to ring. Farmers were coming off a warm, wonderful week of November harvesting, and now they were out of gas?
“As I’m representing 28,000 farmers,” he said Wednesday, moments before his phone rang again, “I started to get phone calls from farmers worried about their crop, their livelihood and the future of their business.”
The harvest is pay-day, after all, after a season that has already been chancy. Planting was generally late because of the wet spring and the snow and hard frost in November put an early book-end on the season.
Haerle, who came from Germany with his parents at age 12, says the harvest of corn and soybeans is generally done from September to the end of October. But that leaves those straggler fields of corn still up in November susceptible to snow and wind blow-down.
The longer you wait, the chancier it gets. Days like Wednesday, for instance, are a complete washout.
“Farmers are the biggest gamblers in the world. We gamble on the markets. We gamble on the weather.”
His farm produces about 6,000 tonnes of corn and beans every year, Haerle said. When the strike hit, he was mostly done harvesting but Tuesday shipped out several hundred tonnes to an industrial dryer in Chesterville.
Though the strike has ended, he just couldn’t wait for the supply lines to resume and dry the remaining crop. “Now we have to play catch up, and catching up creates a lot of stress. This whole story is not over yet.”
Haerle said propane is now being rationed in the agricultural community and he expects it will be two or three weeks before things get back to normal.
He uses about 80,000 litres of propane a year, including a supply to heat the house. Quebec, for one, is a massive consumer of propane, using about 27 railcar tanks every day.
He said Ontario supplies of propane were mostly saved for residential use, so homeowners wouldn’t freeze in the dark.
“Farmers took on a social responsibility and an economic hit to make sure that society has a heat source. But no one will compensate us for our loss.”
He ballparks the strike cost him at least $20,000. Across Canada, meanwhile, the weeklong strike, which ended Tuesday, is estimated to have cost the national economy about $1 billion.