Hello and welcome to “Grain Guy Fifty”! I’m Jim Voigt, and I’m thrilled to launch this blog dedicated to sharing insights, knowledge, and best practices from my 50 years in the feed and grain industry.
If you've followed my writing on grain, logistics, management, and supply chains, you already know what I do. This is a bit of the story behind why I do it and what's been driving me since I was a kid. In the late 1970’s I watched a management and leadership training film entitled “ You Are What You Were When”, produced by Morris Massey. The theme of the film was that your core values, the things that drive your decisions, reactions, and worldview are shaped by the era and
If you want to understand the rise of American agriculture, don’t start with seeds or soil. Start with steel. Start with the rails that cut across the prairie and the rivers that carried grain to the world. The modern U.S. grain industry — its elevators, its markets, its export corridors — is the product of a transportation revolution that unfolded over 150 years. At the center of that transformation sits one of the most consequential infrastructure decisions in U.S. history: