If Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz is true to his word important new regulations meant to avoid a repeat of last year’s crisis in prairie grain movement will be in place by week’s end and farmers are waiting with bated breath.

Nearly two months after the federal government passed the Fair Rail For Grain Farmers Act, farm groups across the prairies say they have yet to set eyes on the act’s supporting draft regulations.

Regulations, Ritz has repeatedly said, that will be finalized and brought into force by August 1 — this Friday, and the start of the next crop year.

Still, not everyone in the farming community is pleased with how the regulations – and the consultation process — have been handled.

“Excuse my french, but it’s bullshit,” Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan President Norm Hall said in a telephone interview with iPolitics Friday.”It’s understandable with the timeline that they’re running on. I understand it’s tight. I understand it all but I don’t like it.”

Both the Canadian Grain Commission and the Canadian Transportation Agency have been meeting with stakeholders since the end of June, asking stakeholders for their regulation wish lists and to provide comment on draft regulations no one has seen.

Providing that comment, though has been challenging, Hall said. The tight timeline means shorter comment turn around times — in the middle of the summer when industry groups have fewer resources because people are on vacation.

The other problem, Hall argued, is that farmers have been given no guarantee their wish lists will actually make it into the regulations.

“How do you know they’ve listened to you? Until the final day it comes out and it’s all set in fast drying cement and it’s something that nothing the industry really wanted, except for maybe for the railroads,” he said. “We have no idea”

When pressed for more information at the annual Canadian Federation of Agriculture summer meeting last week, government officials refused to give any details on the pending regulations, Hall said. “The comments were ‘oh, we can’t talk about that because we’re still developing the regulations’.”

“We might as well have not had that conversation because they couldn’t tell us anything, or wouldn’t but I’m not going to go there with that,” a frustrated Hall said.

While farmers in all prairie provinces struggled to ship their goods, Saskatchewan farmers were particularly hard-hit by last winter’s logistics crisis — where frigid temperatures combined with a record 76-million tonne crop overwhelmed the country’s rail system for months.

The drawn out crisis meant cash flow problems for many farmers while vessels arriving at port to pick up Canadian grain were stuck waiting for weeks, infuriating international customers.

While federal orders — extended under the Fair Rail for Grain Farmers Act — have forced the railways to move grain, several farmers in Saskatchewan still have grain in their bins from last year’s harvest. Thanks to a combination of factors including hauling times and lack of rail cars, Hall himself just finished moving grain for a contract that was supposed to be filled in January.

Now, with several regions – particularly the southeastern corners of Saskatchewan – reduced to islands with silos in the middle because of flood waters, many farmers who still have grain to move can’t get trucks to their bins or access local elevators because of soft roads.

Some farmers have even seen their grain bins or bagged grain flood out, with the high water destroying stored product still waiting to be moved – grain that likely won’t be covered under crop insurance.

As of Thursday, industry estimates for grain carryover – the amount of one year’s crop that will be left to move over the course of the next crop year – were hovering between 15 to 20 million tonnes. Normal carryover numbers range between five and ten million tonnes.

Other farm leaders, though, are opting for a wait and see approach with the expected regulations. Doug Chorney is the president of the Keystone Agriculture Producers in Manitoba where most backlogged grain has finally managed to move.

Typically farmers don’t get to see early versions of regulations, Chorney said Friday when reached by phone at his farm near East Selkirk, MB.”There’s pretty strict rules for regulations whenever they accompany legislation,” he explained. “I’m thinking the federal government is probably bound by the protocols.”

“We’ve definitely had a chance to get our issues out there,” Chorney said. “I have a lot of faith that it will be a good process and I’m not expecting some real shocking development in regulation that no one saw coming.”

“Maybe we won’t get everything we asked for but I think the basic outline of where we need to go is understood well by government and the people working on these things,” he said.

Blair Rutter, the Executive Director for the Western Wheat Growers took a similar stance, insisting the association will comment on the regulations once they’ve been released. “Like many government announcements, you’ll see it when it comes out, but we’ll have to see what the regulations are.”

By then it might be too late, Hall warned. The Fair Rail for Grain Farmers Act is valid until August 2016. If the federal government fails to approve the correct regulations – ones that meet the demands of industry – the emergency legislation could become yet another failed government attempt to keep grain, and other commodities moving, he said.

“You can lobby for changes and try to change the regulations in that two-year timeframe, but if they [the government] don’t listen to us now are they going to listen to us later?,” Hall questioned.

Earlier efforts by farmers to improve rail service have been largely unsuccessful, Hall said. In February 2013, during consultations on the Fair Rail Freight Services Act (C-52), shippers pu​shed for six amendments including a clearer definition of service, mandatory service level agreements and reciprocal penalties.

The government initially rejected all six of the amendments, but has since promised to include many of them in the pending August 1 regulations.

Still, while Chorney insisted he wasn’t worried by the fact he hadn’t seen the promised regulations yet, he said all eyes will be on the railroads come closer to harvest time.

Depending on the size of the fall harvest, the system could face similar challenges, he said.

While a soggy spring saw some 950,000 acres in Manitoba go unseeded this year and another estimated 2.5 million acres impacted by major overland flooding in early July, Chorney said most Manitoba farmers are still expected to harvest an average size crop.

In Western Canada, an average sized crop is about 55 million tonnes for all three provinces combined. Add that tonnage with this year’s projected carryover and the industry will still have about 70 million tonnes of grain to move — close to last year’s record harvest.

“We’ll still have a lot of grain to move over the winter,” Chorney said.