NW Seaport Alliance Pop-Ups Pt 2
With today’s Fruit Grower Report, I’m Bob Larson. A new 49-acre pop-up facility for loaded shipping containers is intended to help ag producers get their goods to foreign
markets more efficiently.
Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack says Seattle is the second West Coast port, after Oakland, to get the pop-up installed and if it works as planned, will get ag products to market with fewer delays …
VILSACK … “This is temporary storage at this facility in order to reduce the operational hurdles and costs associated with these containers to make sure that they get loaded on to ships as quickly as possible.”
Part of the package, Vilsack says includes some incentives for ag companies and cooperatives that preposition containers filled with American-grown commodities …
VILSACK … “We’re also going to provide, as part of this effort, a payment to the shippers, basically $200 per container for dry goods, $400 per container for refrigerated or refer containers. And this is designed to offset some of the logistical costs that will be involved for these efforts in Seattle and Oakland.”
Vilsack says pop-up container facilities should stimulate innovation in several other ways as well …
VILSACK … “Are really designed to give us the ability to be able to meet the market demand in a timely way and the most efficient and most effective way, from a cost standpoint, so that at the end of the day we can see, hopefully, expansion of exports.”
While the pop-up facility is for containers filled with dry goods and dairy, Vilsack says it should help ease delays for everyone else looking to get their goods to market.
