Nutrien employees who work at the Vanscoy mine found out Wednesday morning, the mine will be offline for at least another five weeks.

Nutrien is still planning to send 450 workers at the Allan and Lanigan mines back to work on December 29th. However, there are 265 workers, who were informed this morning (weds) that Vanscoy won’t be recalled until the end of January at the earliest. And whether they are recalled is a decision, according to Will Tigley, Manager, Media and Digital Communications, which will be made based on the company continuing to monitor markets and make decisions accordingly.

In September, Nutrien Ltd announced it was going to shutter its Allan, Lanigan and Vanscoy operations due to a softening in the global fertilizer market.

And in early November, Nutrien said it had been temporarily impacted by a slowdown in potash demand but had a positive outlook for 2020. In a company news release, CEO and President Chuck Magro said, “Nutrien’s third-quarter results and fourth-quarter expectations are impacted by short term market softness. However, we believe that agriculture fundamentals are starting to strengthen and we expect 2020 to be a strong year for crop input demand.”

Also in November, saying the CN strike was the motivating factor, Nutrien announced it was shutting down their Rocanville mine as of December 2nd. The strike ended before then but the company didn’t rescind the decision to curtail production at its Rocanville mine. Those Rocanville workers were back on the job this past Monday.