Freight options provide advantages

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — Rail and waterway transportation systems provide valuable assets for farmers.

“Illinois is situated in a really special place in the United States to be perfectly honest. There’s a lot of of farmers outside of Illinois that would love to be able to access the freight networks that we have available to us,” said Collin Watters, IL Corn’s director of exports and logistics.

Watters was among the presenters at the recent University of Illinois Extension’s Farm Assets Conference.

“The fact that Chicago is kind of center hub for the U.S in terms of rail, we have every Class I railroad and oftentimes some of those rail lines will parallel, too, so there’s some competition amongst the railroads,” he said.

“I lived in Montana for a while where you have one option — the BNSF railroad. If BNSF wants X number of dollars, you pay it, and that will ultimately come out of the farmer’s pocket.”

Waterways

The real asset and difference-maker for Illinois is its water transportation system.

“It’s an incredibly efficient system, and although we believe that it could be far more efficient, it certainly is a huge benefit, and you can see that in basis numbers over time,” Watters said.

The water transportation system encompasses the Mississippi, Ohio, Kaskaskia and Illinois rivers and tributaries.

The Illinois waterways ranks eighth in the nation with 1,100 miles of inland waterways. The industries that are reliant on waterways provide 262,000 jobs, $17.7 billion in personal income, $2 billion going back going back to state and local tax revenue, $28 billion in gross state product and nearly $67 billion in total output.

More than 70 million tons of product moves through the Illinois water transportation system annually — the equivalent of nearly 2 million semi trucks.

Nearly 34 million tons of corn, soybeans and food products for exports are moved along the water system each year, about 7.4 million tons of petroleum products and over 7 million tons of coal, lignite and coke products.

Design Life Exceeded

The success of the water transportation system along the rivers in and adjacent to Illinois hinges on 26 locks and dam, 88% of which have exceeded their 50-year design life and have 600-foot chambers. Only four of those locks have modern 1,200-foot chambers.

Jim Tarmann, IL Corn managing director, has been advocating for modernizing lock and dam infrastructure for decades and said most of the locks and dams in the system are now 75-plus years old.

“The locks and dams were built in the 1930s and 1940s. They were only expected to last like 50 years. On one hand, I’ll commend the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who’s in charge of keeping them operational and as efficient as they can, have done a good job, but on the other hand, I can criticize them for not keeping up, not pushing forward and not staying focused on areas of need,” Tarmann said.

“Back in 2000, our focus began on a program called Navigation and Ecosystems Sustainability Program, which in essence was where the real bottleneck was within the upper Mississippi River system. That exists on locks 20 through 25 on the Mississippi and the LaGrange and Peoria locks on the Illinois. Those were determined to be the locks that were costing you, as farmers and landowners, the most inefficiency.

“Fast-forward, we got authorization and approval for those locks and dams, and we said, ‘yay, hey, we’ve got this, we’re just about there.’”

However, authorization for the work didn’t include funding.

Work continued until fiscal year 2022 when Congress authorized $732 million for a new 1,200-foot chamber at Lock and Dam 25 at Winfield in eastern Missouri on the Mississippi River. Of the seven new 1,200-foot lock chambers authorized by NESP, it was the first to be funded for construction.

Supporters of modernizing the lock and dam system believed work was finally going to begin. However, once the project was reevaluated, the construction cost rose to now $2.2 billion.

“We have less than half of the funding that we need to do that. So, now we’re back in the mode of trying to get the Corps to focus on specific things. Where is the money going to come from? We’re still moving forward, but it’s not quite as fast as what we thought initially was going to be,” Tarmann said.

Expanding the lock systems from 600-foot to 1,200-foot chambers is all about improving efficiency.

“Those locks are 600-foot locks. Back in the 1930s and 1940s during the New Deal everybody probably thought, man, what a boondoggle. This is because we were using a steam-powered paddle wheel pushing through 600-foot docks that were way too big. A modern tow now is 1,200-foot,” Tarmann said.

The 1,200-foot tow require the barge tows to be broken into two for movement through the 600-foot lock, a procedure that generally takes about two to two and a half hours. A 1,200-foot lock will cut the time going through the system to a half hour or less, depending on the traffic.