From Flooding to Drought

For the third year in a row, low water levels are affecting the transportation system. Soy Transportation Coalition Executive Director Mike Steenhoek is surprised after the wet conditions early in the season. “We had a considerable amount of precipitation throughout much of the Midwest in the spring and into the early summer and significant flooding in parts of the Midwest in late June, early July, but then once we started hitting the middle of July, the spigots got turned off.” Lower water levels mean less barge capacity, which turns into higher shipping costs. “What we see overwhelmingly within agriculture is those costs get passed onto the farmer because if we try to pass that increased cost onto a customer, they’ll just elect to purchase more soybeans from elsewhere so they end up passing them onto the farmer in the form of a more negative basis or a wider basis.”