Russia earlier ordered the Azov Sea closed to the movement of commercial vessels until further notice, but kept Russian ports in the Black Sea open for navigation, its officials and five grain industry sources said on Thursday.

Ukraine is a major exporter of corn (maize), much of it destined for China and the European Union. It also competes with Russia to supply wheat to major buyers such as Egypt and Turkey.

Industry estimates currently put Ukraine’s grain exports at about five million to six million tonnes a month, comprising about 4.5 million tonnes are corn, one million tonnes of wheat and a remaining share of mainly barley.

Main grain export ports include Chornomorsk, Mikolayiv, Odessa, Kherson and Yuzhny.

Egypt’s state grains buyer cancelled an international purchasing tender for wheat on Thursday amid reports that no offers of either Russian or Ukrainian wheat had been received.

Russian forces invaded Ukraine on Thursday in a massed assault by land, sea and air, the biggest attack by one state against another in Europe since the Second World War.

“The market is still struggling to get a clear picture of the actual military situation on the ground. The ports in the Azov and Black Sea so far seem not to have been damaged according to the initial shipping agency reports,” one European grain trader said.

The trader said the market was looking out for any declarations of force majeure, meaning suppliers will not fulfil contractual obligations because of extreme circumstances.

Shipping group Maersk said on Thursday it had halted all port calls in Ukraine until the end of February and has shut its main office in Odessa on the Black Sea coast because of the conflict.

Bloomberg on Thursday quoted officials from U.S. grain firm Cargill as saying a ship it chartered was hit in Ukrainian waters in the Black Sea. The empty vessel and its crew are safe and accounted for, the company said.

Russia, the world’s largest wheat exporter, mainly ships its grain from ports in the Black Sea. The Azov Sea’s ports are shallower and have less capacity.

Mariupol, reported to be under attack from Russian forces, one of the biggest Ukrainian ports in the Azov Sea, mainly handles relatively small ships of between 3,000 to 10,000 tonnes deadweight.

The Azov Sea ports export wheat, barley and corn to Mediterranean importers including Cyprus, Egypt, Italy, Lebanon and Turkey.

Another European trader, speaking on condition of anonymity, said such countries would have to seek alternative supplies if the ships were unable to depart in the near future.

Wheat prices in Chicago rose to the highest level in 9-1/2 years on Thursday as the conflict threatened to disrupt the flow of supplies from the region while European wheat futures climbed to a record peak.

Russia and Ukraine account for 29 per cent of global wheat exports, 19 per cent of world maize (corn) exports, and 80 per cent of world sunflower oil exports. Read full story

Russia produced 76 million tonnes of wheat last year and is expected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to export 35 million tonnes in the July-June season, 17 per cent of the global total.

Russia supplies wheat to all the major global buyers. Turkey and Egypt are the largest importers.

Ukraine asked Turkey on Thursday to close the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits to Russian ships, the Ukrainian ambassador to Ankara said.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said he backed Ukraine’s territorial integrity but there was no immediate response to Kyiv’s request.

Under the 1936 Montreux Convention, Ankara has control over the straits and can limit the passage of warships in wartime or if threatened.

— Reporting for Reuters by Polina Devitt, Gleb Stolyarov, Natalia Zinets, Michael Hogan and Gavin Maguire; writing by Nigel Hunt.

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Bayer, the chemical company whose Roundup brand remains the best known of the glyphosate herbicides, reported as much in an open letter to customers dated Friday.

The letter, signed by Udo Schneider, the company’s global head for active ingredient manufacturing, said one of the company’s “key raw material suppliers experienced a mechanical failure in its manufacturing plant which leads to a substantial reduction in production rates.”

That breakdown, which Schneider said “constitutes a force majeure event for Bayer,” is expected to take about three months to repair, he wrote.

“Force majeure,” in contract law, refers to an unforeseeable set of circumstances under which a party to a contract is unable to fulfill its agreed-upon terms. It’s often referred to as the “act of God” clause, under which a party may be legally excused for the resulting breach of contract.

In this case, Schneider wrote, Bayer’s “ability to supply its customers with glyphosate or glyphosate-containing products,” including current purchase orders and other agreements, “has been impacted.”

A representative for Bayer CropScience’s Canadian arm on Sunday confirmed the letter, saying via email the company is “on track to restore production, and we’ve sourced additional materials and made other mitigation efforts to help best manage this situation.”

As for the impact on farmers’ ability to lock in a supply of Roundup this year, “we’re currently working to understand what the true impact may be in Canada and are committed to communicate with our customers as we know more in the coming days and weeks,” the Canadian rep said.

Bayer, Schneider said, is “co-operat(ing) seamlessly” with the supplier in this case along with “other partners of trust” to limit the impact of the problem.

On top of this issue, Bayer’s Canadian rep reiterated the ag chem market worldwide was already “experiencing historically tight supply due to challenging global trade flows, effects of the global pandemic and other forces.”

Neither Schneider nor Bayer CropScience Canada named the specific supplier, the location of the breakdown or the ingredient in question.

The Roundup brand of glyphosate came to Bayer when it took over chemical and seed company Monsanto in 2019.

Debuting in the mid-1970s as a broad-spectrum Group 9 herbicide for control of grassy and broadleaf weeds, glyphosate’s market reach expanded vastly in the late 1990s when Monsanto launched “Roundup Ready” varieties of crops such as soybeans, canola and corn, all genetically modified to tolerate applications of the chemical. Its reach expanded further as the chemistry came off patent in the early 2000s.

However, since in-crop applications of glyphosate have become more commonplace, a number of weed varieties have developed resistance to the product.

In recent years glyphosate has also entangled Bayer in lawsuits from users claiming exposure to Roundup caused them to develop cancers, in the wake of a 2015 decision from the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classifying the chemical as “probably carcinogenic.” — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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Olymel shut the plant on Wednesday and declared force majeure — unforeseeable circumstances that prevent contract fulfilment. Alberta’s health department knows of 426 infections linked to the outbreak, including one death, spokesman Tom McMillan said.

The virus spread fast last spring in Canadian and U.S. meat plants, where people typically work closely together. Cargill temporarily closed its Guelph, Ont. beef plant in December.

The Alberta backlog amounts to 80,000-90,000 hogs, and Olymel hopes to clear it four to five weeks after the plant reopens, spokesman Richard Vigneault said, adding the timing of reopening was unclear. Olymel has begun shipping pigs that it raised on its own farms to U.S. packers, he said.

If the closure lasts longer than two weeks, costs and pigs will add up quickly, said Darcy Fitzgerald, executive director of Alberta Pork. The farmer group has asked Ottawa to offset extra feed and transport costs, he said.

The federal government is assessing the situation and will provide funding if needed, Agriculture Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau said.

Vigneault said Olymel has laid off the plant’s 1,850 workers. The facility can slaughter 45,000 hogs weekly.

Rival Maple Leaf Foods has increased processing modestly at its Brandon, Man. plant to ease the backlog, vice-president Janet Riley said.

Canada is the world’s third-largest pork exporter.

U.S. pork processors should be able to handle the influx of Canadian hogs if the animals are ready for slaughter over several weeks, said Altin Kalo, agricultural economist for Steiner Consulting.

The United States typically imports 100,000 hogs a week from Canada, according to U.S. government data.

U.S. pork companies have been slaughtering about 2.6 million to 2.7 million hogs per week.

— Reporting for Reuters by Rod Nickel in Winnipeg and Tom Polansek in Chicago.

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Conestoga Meats, based at Breslau, just east of Kitchener, notified hog farmers and shippers on Friday that it would suspend “most operations” during the week of April 27 to May 1, Ontario Pork said in a memo to producers.

The company, which has operated since 1982 and has been owned by the Progressive Pork Producers co-operative since 2001, announced the temporary shutdown after a “small number” of employees tested positive for COVID-19, the hog producer agency said.

The company “has determined that it would benefit from additional time to enhance health and safety measures further” at the federally-inspected plant, Ontario Pork said.

Processing at Conestoga is thus expected to resume on Monday (May 4), and cutting on Tuesday.

The company in early April announced it will screen all employees with questions about possible symptoms and potential exposure prior to the start of shifts, further step up cleaning and sanitizing and take “all possible measures to ensure appropriate social distancing.”

Those measures included rearranging shifts to have fewer people in the plant at a time; setting up “alternate entries” to maintain distance and limit interaction at shift changes; repurposing meeting rooms and adding tents to expand employee eating and break areas; and suspending all unnecessary training and meetings, the company said.

The company on March 23 also announced a $2 per hour “hero premium” for all hourly employees at its processing and distribution centre until further notice.

The usual supply chains for hog producers in Ontario had come under strain in late March when meat packer Olymel temporarily shut its plant at Yamachiche, Que., about 20 km west of Trois-Rivieres due to COVID-19 cases among employees.

That plant re-opened April 14 at “limited capacity,” Ontario Pork said, noting force majeure notifications Olymel sent to Ontario producers still apply and the company will still accept Ontario hogs at “proportionate volumes.”

Meanwhile, Ontario’s other major federally inspected pork slaughter and processing plant, the Fearman’s Pork facility at Burlington, has “implemented strict COVID-19 protocols” similar to Conestoga, Ontario Pork said.

Sofina Foods, the Burlington plant’s owner since 2012, also set up a $2 per hour premium for front-line employees in production and distribution starting March 25. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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The crisis forced a decision that still troubles him: He ordered his employees to give injections to the pregnant sows, one by one, that would cause them to abort their baby pigs.

Van Beek and other farmers say they have no choice but to cull livestock as they run short on space to house their animals or money to feed them, or both. The world’s biggest meat companies — including Smithfield Foods, Cargill, JBS USA and Tyson Foods — have halted operations at about 20 slaughterhouses and processing plants in North America since April as workers fall ill, stoking global fears of a meat shortage.

Van Beek’s piglets are victims of a sprawling food-industry crisis that began with the mass closure of restaurants — upending that sector’s supply chain, overwhelming storage and forcing farmers and processors to destroy everything from milk to salad greens to animals. Processors geared up to serve the food-service industry can’t immediately switch to supplying grocery stores.

Millions of pigs, chickens and cattle will be euthanized because of slaughterhouse closures, limiting supplies at grocers, said John Tyson, chairman of top U.S. meat supplier Tyson Foods.

Pork has been hit especially hard, with daily production cut by about a third. Unlike cattle, which can be housed outside on pasture, U.S. hogs are fattened up for slaughter inside temperature-controlled buildings. If they are housed too long, they can get too big and injure themselves. The barns need to be emptied out by sending adult hogs to slaughter before the arrival of new piglets from sows that were impregnated just before the pandemic.

“We have nowhere to go with the pigs,” said Van Beek, who lamented the waste of so much meat. “What are we going to do?”

In Minnesota, farmers Kerry and Barb Mergen felt their hearts pound when a crew from Daybreak Foods arrived with carts and tanks of carbon dioxide to euthanize their 61,000 egg-laying hens earlier this month.

Daybreak Foods, based in Lake Mills, Wisconsin, supplies liquid eggs to restaurants and food-service companies. The company, which owns the birds, pays contract farmers like the Mergens to feed and care for them. Drivers normally load the eggs onto trucks and haul them to a plant in Big Lake, Minnesota, which uses them to make liquid eggs for restaurants and ready-to-serve dishes for food-service companies. But the plant’s operator, Cargill, said it idled the facility because the pandemic reduced demand.

Daybreak Foods, which has about 14.5 million hens with contractor-run or company-owned farms in the Midwest, is trying to switch gears and ship eggs to grocery stores, said CEO William Rehm. But egg cartons are in shortage nationwide and the company now must grade each egg for size, he said.

Rehm declined to say how much of the company’s flock has been euthanized.

“We’re trying to balance our supply with our customers’ needs, and still keep everyone safe — including all of our people and all our hens,” Rehm said.

Landfill

In Iowa, farmer Dean Meyer said he is part of a group of about nine producers who are euthanizing the smallest five per cent of their newly born pigs, or about 125 piglets a week. They will continue euthanizing animals until disruptions ease, and could increase the number of pigs killed each week, he said. The small bodies are composted and will become fertilizer. Meyer’s group is also killing sows to reduce their numbers, he said.

“Packers are backed up every day, more and more,” said Meyer.

As the United States faces a possible food shortage, and supermarkets and food banks are struggling to meet demand, the forced slaughters are becoming more widespread across the country, according to agricultural economists, farm trade groups and federal lawmakers who are hearing from farmer constituents.

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, along with both U.S. senators from a state that provides a third of the nation’s pork, sent a letter to the Trump administration pleading for financial help and assistance with culling animals and properly disposing of their carcasses.

“There are 700,000 pigs across the nation that cannot be processed each week and must be humanely euthanized,” said the April 27 letter.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) said late Friday it is establishing a National Incident Coordination Center to help farmers find markets for their livestock, or euthanize and dispose of animals if necessary.

Some producers who breed livestock and sell baby pigs to farmers are now giving them away for free, farmers said, translating to a loss about $38 on each piglet, according to commodity firm Kerns and Associates (all figures US$).

Farmers in neighbouring Canada are also killing animals they can’t sell or afford to feed. The value of Canadian isoweans — baby pigs — has fallen to zero because of U.S. processing plant disruptions, said Rick Bergmann, a Manitoba hog farmer and chair of the Canadian Pork Council. In Quebec alone, a backlog of 92,000 pigs waits for slaughter, said Quebec hog producer Rene Roy, an executive with the pork council.

A hog farm on Prince Edward Island in Canada euthanized 270-lb. hogs that were ready for slaughter because there was no place to process them, Bergmann said. The animals were dumped in a landfill.

Death threats

The latest economic disaster to befall the farm sector comes after years of extreme weather, sagging commodity prices and the Trump administration’s trade war with China and other key export markets. But it’s more than lost income. The pandemic barreling through farm towns has mired rural communities in despair, a potent mix of shame and grief.

Farmers take pride in the fact that their crops and animals are meant to feed people, especially in a crisis that has idled millions of workers and forced many to rely on food banks. Now, they’re destroying crops and killing animals for no purpose.

Farmers flinch when talking about killing off animals early or plowing crops into the ground, for fear of public wrath. Two Wisconsin dairy farmers, forced to dump milk by their buyers, told Reuters they recently received anonymous death threats.

“They say, ‘How dare you throw away food when so many people are hungry?’,” said one farmer, speaking on condition of anonymity. “They don’t know how farming works. This makes me sick, too.”

Even as livestock and crop prices plummet, prices for meat and eggs at grocery stores are up. The average retail price of eggs was up nearly 40 per cent for the week ended April 18, compared to a year earlier, according to Nielsen data. Average retail fresh chicken prices were up 5.4 per cent, while beef was up 5.8 per cent and pork up 6.6 per cent.

On Van Beek’s farm in Rock Valley, Iowa, one hog broke a leg because it grew too heavy while waiting to be slaughtered. He has delivered pigs to facilities that are still operating, but they are too full to take all of his animals.

Van Beek paid $2,000 to truck pigs about seven hours to a Smithfield plant in Illinois, more than quadruple the usual cost to haul them to a Sioux Falls, South Dakota, slaughterhouse that the company has closed indefinitely. He said Smithfield is supposed to pay the extra transportation costs under his contract. But the company is refusing to do so, claiming “force majeure” — that an extraordinary and unforeseeable event prevents it from fulfilling its agreement.

Smithfield, the world’s largest pork processor, declined to comment on whether it has refused to make contracted payments. It said the company is working with suppliers “to navigate these challenging and unprecedented times.”

Hog farmers nationwide will lose an estimated $5 billion, or $37 per head, for the rest of the year due to pandemic disruptions, according to the industry group National Pork Producers Council.

A recently announced $19 billion U.S. government coronavirus aid package for farmers will not pay for livestock that are culled, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation, the nation’s largest farmer trade group.

USDA said in a statement the payment program is still being developed and the agency has received more requests for assistance than it has money to handle.

Minnesota farmer Mike Patterson started feeding his pigs more soybean hulls — which fill animals’ stomachs but offer negligible nutritional value — to keep them from getting too large for their barns. He’s considering euthanizing them because he cannot find enough buyers after Smithfield indefinitely shut its massive Sioux Falls plant.

“They have to be housed humanely,” Patterson said. “If there’s not enough room, we have to have less hogs somehow. One way or another, we’ve got to have less hogs.”

— Reporting for Reuters by Tom Polansek and P.J. Huffstutter in Chicago; additional reporting by Rod Nickel in Winnipeg; writing by P.J. Huffstutter.

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The CTA — the quasi-judicial tribunal and regulator for the Canadian transport sector — on Wednesday granted a request filed by an unnamed representative of Manitoba’s provincial opposition New Democrats to order OmniTrax Canada’s Hudson Bay Railway Co. (HBR) to begin repairs on the line.

The rail line, which runs from the northwestern Manitoba communities of The Pas and Flin Flon northeast through Thompson to the Port of Churchill on Hudson Bay, hasn’t operated since May 2017, following flooding and washouts along the stretch between Amery (about 45 km northeast of Gillam) and Churchill.

OmniTrax declared force majeure and an indefinite suspension of operations on the line on June 9.

The application from the Manitoba NDP caucus alleged HBR is in violation of its level-of-service obligations and asked the CTA to order the company to compensate residents along the line for job losses and rising costs of goods, and to either repair the line or undertake the same transfer/discontinuance process other railways are required to follow.

The CTA found HBR has been in breach of its obligations since November 2017 and must “initiate repair of the rail line by July 3, 2018 and resume its operation as expeditiously as possible.”

HBR also must file progress reports on the line’s repair once a month starting Aug. 1 “until operation of the rail line has resumed.”

“This is the first order forcing HBR and OmniTrax to repair the line that any level of government has received,” provincial NDP leader Wab Kinew said in a release Friday.

The shutdown of the line and port “has caused severe and ongoing economic losses to the town, including significant job losses,” the party said in its release. “Families have been struggling to afford the rising costs of food, household items and building materials.”

In its ruling, the CTA noted the NDP representative’s argument that even if flooding was found to be a “force majeure” event — in which unforeseeable circumstances prevent a party from meeting its agreed-upon obligations — it would only entitle HBR to claim a “reasonable pause” in operations, not to discontinue service altogether.

The NDP representative said OmniTrax in July last year claimed the damage could be repaired by the end of October that year for between $20 million and $60 million. However, the party rep was quoted as saying in the ruling, “a more fulsome investigation” might have found another cost estimate to cover the “immediate” repairs needed.

The CTA, citing an “undisputed” report by AECOM on the condition of the line, found “immediate” repairs include 21 track washouts, a culvert washout, two bridges with washout damage, two with “other” damage and one with heaving, plus three “unstable areas.”

Other “immediate but non-essential” repairs, the CTA said, include 33 culvert sites to be replaced or repaired and 11 with washout damage, 46 wooden box-type culverts to be replaced, eight bridges in need of repair or “further investigation” and three “unstable areas.”

However, the agency said, HBR claims it “cannot be compelled to bankrupt itself in order to provide reasonable service” and its service obligations “must be tempered by economic considerations.”

HBR cited precedents including a 2017 CTA case, brought by Univar Canada against Canadian Pacific Railway (CP), over the railway’s level-of-service obligations following a fire damaging a rail bridge leading to Univar’s Richmond, B.C. plant.

In the Univar case, the agency said it accepted that a force majeure event could make it impossible for a railway to provide service for “a period of time it termed a reasonable pause.”

However, the agency added, it “specifically rejected the notion that a railway company can be permanently relieved of its service obligations without following the transfer and discontinuance process.”

Any rail company that doesn’t avail itself of the transfer and discontinuance process, the CTA said, “has ongoing obligations… including service obligations.” HBR thus is “not permanently relieved from its level of service obligations” as they relate to the damaged line.

The CTA, referring again to the AECOM report, “which HBR itself commissioned,” found the Hudson Bay line could have been returned to operations for the “safe passage of light loaded trains” in November last year, thus the period of “reasonable pause” runs only until then.

The agency said it doesn’t have authority to order HBR to compensate other affected parties for expenses they incurred after the line was shut down.

It temporarily had such authority, it noted, when the Fair Rail for Grain Farmers Act was in effect from May 2014 until August 2016, and it has such authority again after the passage of the Transportation Modernization Act into law on May 23 this year.

An order for HBR to repair the line, however, is “clearly warranted in the circumstances of an ongoing service breach.”

The federal government on May 30 announced a deal in principle for the sale of the Hudson Bay line and Churchill port facilities to a buying group including Toronto investment firm Fairfax Financial Holdings; Regina pulse crop processor AGT Food and Ingredients; and Missinippi Rail Partners, a joint operation of Missinippi Rail Limited Partnership and OneNorth, representing northern communities in Manitoba and Nunavut. That deal has yet to be finalized.

Denver-based OmniTrax has owned the port and rail line since 1997. The rail line, completed in 1929, and the port facility, built by 1931, were set up to serve northern communities and provide an alternate shipping route into and out of Western and central Canada.

From a grain export perspective, railing grain out of certain areas of Saskatchewan and Manitoba up and out through Churchill instead of east to Thunder Bay is believed to shave up to three days off voyages to some ports in Western Europe.

But the port’s grain handle declined following the deregulation of its main customer, the Canadian Wheat Board. OmniTrax shut down the port facility and laid off its staff before the 2016 grain shipping season.

The port’s ice-limited shipping season, typically July through October, has been a benefactor of global warming in recent years, but warmer weather also makes the rail line, much of which is built on permafrost, less stable. — AGCanada.com Network

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The shortage stems from an Oct. 31 fire during the startup of an aroma chemicals plant operated by global chemical firm BASF in its corporate hometown of Ludwigshafen, Germany.

The fire forced BASF to shut down the plant, which makes citral and isoprenol ingredients, and declare force majeure — that is, a legal suspension of a contractual obligation due to a situation beyond a party’s control — on delivery of those products.

BASF is the world’s biggest manufacturer of citral, making about 40,000 tonnes a year. Apart from its aromatic uses, citral is a “starting material” for processing vitamin A and E and carotenoid feed ingredients.

The company said Nov. 10 its vitamin A and E plants, which were also shut down around that time for scheduled routine maintenance, now can’t be restarted until the company’s supplies of citral and “corresponding intermediates” become available.

BASF thus announced it would have to extend its force majeure to its deliveries of vitamin A and E and several carotenoid ingredients.

Feed manufacturers, as a result, have had to revise their feed formulations with reduced levels of vitamins A and E, in order to continue to provide feed to livestock, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said in a statement Thursday.

Temporary reformulations of feeds to reduce levels of vitamins A and E is “not expected to cause any undue safety or welfare risks to livestock,” CFIA said.

However, to show that a given domestic or imported feed product is effective for its intended purpose, CFIA requires the product label to carry guarantees of certain nutrient levels.

Normally, changing a product’s label guarantee for vitamins A and E would require an administrative amendment, but CFIA announced an interim measure Thursday given the “temporary nature of the situation.”

Processors who have to reformulate feeds, with the aim of conserving inventories of vitamins A and E, may instead provide CFIA with a notification of reformulation, and attest that their labelling accurately reflects nutrient guarantees.

The revised guarantees will be allowed until supplies of vitamins A and E have stabilized, after which processors’ guarantees for these vitamins will return to the levels as approved in their registrations, CFIA said.

The cleanup, follow-up inspection, repair and restart for BASF’s citral plant — and the restart for affected downstream plants — are expected to take “several weeks,” the company said Nov. 10.

BASF also said at the time it would be “implementing measures to limit the consequences of the situation.” — AGCanada.com Network

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A majority of facilities on the river, which are delivery points for soybean futures traded on CME’s Chicago Board of Trade, are unable to load crops due to high water levels, according to the notice.

The force majeure declaration means that delivery contracts do not have to be filled in their agreed time frame.

The move is not expected to have a significant impact on CBOT soybean futures “unless it remains in place for a very long time,” said Terry Reilly, analyst with Futures International in Chicago.

The CBOT January futures contract is in its two-week delivery period but so far no contracts have been delivered against futures. As of Monday afternoon, no contracts were registered for delivery.

The exchange previously declared force majeure on Illinois River soy and corn delivery points in June and July due to flooding. The initial June announcement marked the first declaration of force majeure on the river in more than two years.

— Reporting for Reuters by Julie Ingwersen in Chicago.

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