Eastern IA Farmer_Fall23_SOUTH

CHANGING RIVER
Mississippi at Bettendorf, Muscatine,
New Boston and Keithsburg, Ill.
“We made it down to 3.5 feet,” Heims
said of last fall’s low water.
With levels so low, barges could only
be partially loaded. “Since we could
only load up about halfway, we needed
more barges up this direction,” she said.
“Having it be so low, we had to double
the amount of barges.”
“Since we could only load up
about halfway, we needed
more barges up this direction.
Having it be so low, we had to
double the amount of barges.”
— SYDNEY HEIMS
Barge scarcity drove price increases
during last fall’s low water, according to
Jeremy Putman, who owns Riverview
Tug Service in Bellevue with his wife,
Julie Putman. The Putmans’ first business
was a grocery service for towboats. They
now run their own small tows.
Not only did the shipping industry need
more barges to haul the same amount of
grain during last fall’s historic low water,
but Putman said that the cost of building
a barge has skyrocketed in the last several
years, due to higher material costs and
closing shipyards.
Barge scarcity continued to impact
shipping in 2023.
“Even this spring, we had a lot on the
books and were trying to get barges in,”
Heims said.
Farmers try to book grain as soon as
possible in the spring to get it out of their
bins before planting.
“With corn and beans, there’s shrinkage
if they’re sitting in the grain bins so
long,” Heims said. That’s when farmers
get “antsy” to get it “out of their bin and
into ours.”
Flooding this spring again impacted
loading.
“Once we get to 17.5, 18 feet, we get
to a limit when we can’t load a barge,”
Heims said. “One of our elevators, once it
hits 18 feet, it goes over floodwalls.”
And at New Boston, flood cleanup of
downed trees and limbs further slowed
loading even after the water went down.
The case for maintenance
Barges pushed by towboats on the Mississippi
River transport both inputs upstream
to farmers and grain downstream.
Almost a fifth of fertilizer is moved by
barge, according to a 2023 report by The
Fertilizer Institute, which lobbies for
maintenance of the locks and dams for
commercial shipping on the Mississippi
River.
In 2019, the last year for which annual
data is tabulated, about 31 million tons
of soybeans moved across the country by
barge, along with about 22 million tons
of corn, according to the U.S. Department
of Agriculture’s Agricultural Marketing
Service.
In Iowa in 2022-23, more than 65
percent of soybean movements were
by barge (about 3.6 million short tons),
according to the Soybean Transportation
Coalition. The Soybean Transportation
Coalition is funded by the Soybean
Checkoff and also rings the bell for
maintaining and upgrading the nearly-
100-year-old infrastructure of the lock
and dam system.
At LeClaire’s Lock and Dam No. 14,
Hank said that the crew spends much of
each winter doing “preventative maintenance”
in preparation for the next year’s
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