While attending the NAFB Summer Agri-Business Meeting at the Danforth Plant Center in St. Louis, Missouri, Farm Director KC Sheperd sat in with a panel of experts in the transportation and agricultural sectors as they discussed the critical role that inland waters play in global ag commerce. On the panel, were Mary Lamie, Executive Vice President of Multi-Modal Enterprises, Dennis Wilmsmeyer, Executive Director of America’s Central Port, and Meagan Kaiser, a Missouri Farmer and Past Chair of United Soybean Board of Directors.
When asked how the volume over the Mississippi River levels have changed over the years and how it has impacted supply chain disruptions, Executive Director of America’s Central Port Dennis Wilmsmeyer responded, “We’ve had low water on the Mississippi for about two years until very recently, and low water is not kind to the barge industry. A lot of product is lost in that situation because you can’t fully load those barges, and it is left sitting on the dock.
“When you can put seventeen hundred tons on one barge and then tie those barges together on the lower Mississippi River, thirty to forty barges at a time, you can move a lot of commodity. When you have to leave ten or fifteen percent of that on the dock in low water situations, it certainly does affect profit due to the reduced volume that you can move down the river.”
From living in the Midwest, Executive Vice President of Multi-Modal Enterprises Mary Lamie realizes the immediacy of the need for agricultural products over the next thirty years as the world population is expected to increase by twenty-five percent and is already facing food scarcity problems. “When you talk about infrastructure, and the need for these ports and better utilizing the inland waterway system, that is why it is so important,” she said.
She added that supply chain disruptions are difficult to predict because they could be due to high or low water situations, tariffs, or global political problems. She said that the important thing for those charged with the task is communication and cooperation with the Department of Transportation, the National Coast Guard, and the Corps of Engineers.
“There are a lot of things in the queue, but we are focusing more on resiliency. It’s about being proactive and finding solutions to lessen risk during those periods,” she said.
She emphasized the importance of inland waterway systems and the diversity of the commodities they move.
About the volumes of those commodities, Wilmsmeyer said that they are down from past years and would readily welcome more products on the river system. He explained that when moving a barge up or down the river, it makes no difference what it contains. Clothing, shoes, textiles, lumber or anything else that could fit in a 20-to-40-foot container on a barge could utilize the waterway.
Lamey spoke on how the Missouri River is currently under-utilized in the supply chain. She said, “It is a tremendous, missed opportunity for the current environment that we are in right now based on cost-effectiveness. However, one thing that we learned during COVID, as far as having supply chain options, is the importance of having the flexibility to redirect freight to another option. That is where we feel very strongly about the Missouri and the Illinois rivers. It is key to partner with them, rather than compete against them, just like we partner with Kansas City, Memphis, Chicago and Nebraska. We focus quite a bit on the interstate system and the ability for freight to get to the inland waterway system.”
As an example of how states work together to better utilize the inland waterway system, she explained that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has identified sixteen high-volume domestic agricultural highways beginning in South Dakota and continuing through Kansas City and the St. Louis area.
“That network of interstates also represents the multi-modal component as far as how freight gets to the inland waterway system. That’s where the mentality of not only considering the St. Louis area or the state of Missouri, but also partnering with all of these different states,” she concluded.
Wilmsmeyer added that the Missouri River was all but shut down twenty years ago, partially due to core policy and partially due to underutilization, and he agreed that it continues to be under-utilized. “Currently, we are pushing for more operators on the river system. We love seeing what Kansas City, Brunswick, Boonville, and other areas are doing with establishing ports and trying to put more barges on the river system, really to get that grain.”
He said that while railcars are coming into the Central Port of America from all over the Midwest, he doesn’t see any reason modes of transport couldn’t be going closer to home for most of the farmers in the Midwest allowing them to get their products to the river system as quickly as possible. He explained that getting products on a barge and floating down the river as soon as possible, is a cost-effective move for producers.
Wilmsmeyer explained. “It opens up a whole new opportunity, specialty grains being one of those, to be able to containerize them and ship them to foreign markets.”
Meagan Kaiser, Past Chair of United Soybean Board and a Missouri Farmer, added, “JFK has a famous quote, ‘Farmers buy at retail, sell at bulk, and pay freight both ways.’ So, it is very important for us to have that infrastructure not only for our exports, but also for the fertilizer to ensure that we have what we need to produce a nutritious crop for the next cycle.”
She asked listers to imagine grain-drying, closed containers at the edges of a farmer’s field so that the farmer could directly sell the container to someone in another country.
“Imagine my opportunity as a commodity farmer to diversify and market myself because I will grow exactly what buyers want,” she urged. “I wouldn’t have to attribute a fifty-thousand-bushel grain bin to any one type. I could just start doing it with a closed container at the edge of my field and get it to the buyer in a more reliable, sustainable, and efficient way. Imagine the opportunities that we haven’t even dreamt of yet by opening up and bending the value chain and allowing our farmers to direct market.”
She added that this concept was a win-win for all involved and would ensure that the shipping containers were filled going both up and down the river.
