12-11 FB Barges & Grain

  Big wheel keep on turning,... talk about ironies and coincidences, I just got back from Hannibal Missouri where Mark Twain was raised. It’s a town right on the Mississippi and while I was there, I saw tugboat after tugboat hauling huge barges behind them. I couldn’t see what the cargo was inside the barges but it wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination to think that it was possibly grain. Well, according to the Idaho Statesman, after months of drought, companies that ship grain and other goods down the Mississippi River are being haunted by a potential nightmare: If water levels fall too low, the nation's main inland waterway could become impassable to barges just as the harvest heads to market. Here’s my question. How does that affect grain producers in the Northwest? I called Idaho Grain Producers Association Executive Director Travis Jones: “it has been an ongoing issue for at least the last couple of years. When the water gets too low, they do not have enough water to move the barges up and down the river and that is a problem. Is that going to affect grain producers in Idaho? Not as much as it would those folks in the Midwest.