The owners of Manitoba’s northern grain port at Churchill and the Hudson Bay Railway have set a 2008 goal of a million tonnes of traffic through the port.
OmniTrax, the Denver company that runs the port and rail line serving it, set the target Monday, as port officials announced that the port handled 621,000 tonnes, its highest annual grain throughput since 1977, during its 2007 shipping season.
All the port’s grain traffic this year was in wheat and durum, bound for markets in Africa, Italy and Brazil. Of this year’s grain throughput, 100 per cent was handled on behalf of the port’s main shipper, the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB), up from 79 per cent in 2006. Grain made up 90 per cent of the port’s total traffic in 2007.
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Churchill’s 2007 shipping season wrapped up with the departure on Oct. 26 of the Kapitan Sviridov, a Russian vessel that unloaded fertilizer for Farmers of North America, a Prairie farmers’ bulk buying group. The vessel was reloaded with 18,000 tonnes of wheat bound for Italy.
The Russian fertilizer was the first inbound shipment seen at the port in years and the first ever under the “Arctic Bridge” concept, proposed to link Russian and Canadian Prairie markets through Churchill.
The CWB, in a release Monday, noted it also brokered the port’s first-ever domestic grain shipment in September this year, by re-loading an Arctic supply ship with wheat bound for a Halifax miller.
The 621,000 tonnes of grain handle this year falls short of the 1977 record, when 729,183 tonnes of CWB grain were shipped through the port, mostly to the former Soviet Union, which no longer imports wheat.
From 1997 to 2007, annual CWB shipments through Churchill have averaged 410,000 tonnes, representing 87 per cent of Churchill’s annual grain exports, the board said.
Along with the wheat shipments and inbound fertilizer this year, the port and railway “enjoyed record shipments of goods and supplies to the Kivilliq region of Nunavut” in 2007, said OmniTrax managing director Mike Ogborn in a separate release.
Although limited in its shipping window due to ice on Hudson Bay, Churchill is considered the most efficient export route for grain from the grain-growing regions of northern and eastern Saskatchewan and northwestern Manitoba. Farmers save in terms of rail freight costs and avoiding St. Lawrence Seaway charges, the CWB said.
