🌐 October 14, 2023: Hoosier AG Today > Due to the current water levels, restrictions have been placed on barges like what happened this same time last year.

by C.J. Miller
October 14, 2023
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“Out of the concern for a lack of channel depth, because there’s less water in the navigation channel, you’re more reluctant as a barge company to load as much freight—and soybeans in our case—on a barge because you’re concerned that it could actually scrape the bottom. So, you’re seeing barge companies resort to a 25 percent reduction on the amount loaded into an individual barge,” he says.

With barges taking on lighter shipments of grain, the price to ship that grain goes up, which Steenhoek says that price increase eventually gets passed down to the farmer.

“You’re seeing an excess of a 100 percent increase in large freight rates over the three-year average,” according to Steenhoek. “When something like that happens in agriculture, the costs are disproportionately passed on to the farmer in the form of a lower price or a more negative basis. We’re seeing evidence of that currently. We certainly saw that last year with low water conditions in 2022.”
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