GRAIN GUY FIFTY BLOG

The United States does not have one grain waterway. It has several major corridors, each with its own territory, market connections, and operating limits. The closest blue line on a map is not automatically the best path to market. Key takeaways • A watershed and a working waterway are not the same thing. A river can drain a large basin and still be a weak freight route. The Kaskaskia in Illinois sits in the Mississippi watershed. It is not a peer of the Illinois Waterway or

America’s inland waterways are freight infrastructure. The math on one 15-barge tow is why they touch every bushel a U.S. elevator sells. Key takeaways • One 15-barge tow moves about 22,500 tons. That is roughly 225 railcars, or about 870 to 900 trucks, in a single move. • The working system covers about 12,000 miles across 38 states. It moves on the order of 500 million tons of freight a year, worth more than $158 billion. Grain shares the water with fertilizer, fuel, steel,