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Insufficient Freight: An Assessment of U.S. Transportation Infrastructure and Its Effects on the Grain Industry

Insufficient Freight: An Assessment of U.S. Transportation Infrastructure and Its Effects on the Grain Industry

Full Title: Insufficient Freight: An Assessment of U.S. Transportation Infrastructure and Its Effects on the Grain Industry
Author(s): Elaine Kub
Publisher(s): American Farm Bureau Federation
Publication Date: July 1, 2015
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):

Waiting three minutes for 110 train cars of oil to pass a rail crossing may just seem like one of life’s inevitable little annoyances. But as these seemingly small irritations occur with ever-increasing frequency across the United States, they have become a hallmark of the strain that plagues America’s entire freight system. A host of commodities have all been crowding our freight infrastructure at a time when some shipping routes weren’t growing quickly enough to accommodate demand (railroad infrastructure), some shipping routes were held up by political uncertainty (pipelines), and some simply had limited physical capacity (barge shipping on the Mississippi River). Alongside larger shipments of coal and container traffic, the agriculture industry contributes to the overall congestion with its tendency to produce ever-larger record-sized harvests of grains, oilseeds, and their byproducts. But it is the surge in crude oil shipments from the Bakken formation in
North Dakota that presents the most concern. The region where rail traffic of crude oil has grown the most covers exactly the same states we think of as the Upper Midwest states – Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Montana. As rail congestion continues to worsen, especially if the main driver of that congestion is additional crude oil traffic, grain producers in the Upper Midwest states will feel the effects.

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