Historically Low Water Levels on the Mississippi River Cause Shipping Woes Transcript

A warm fall and expanding extreme drought conditions have helped water levels along the Mississippi River drop to record lows. Special Correspondent Megan Thompson reports from Missouri on what conditions on this vital commercial root mean for farmers who rely on it to get their crops to market?

October is one of the busiest times of year for Iowa Farmer Robb Ewoldt. His crops are ready for harvest and he needs to work fast to take advantage of good weather, like today.

We’re currently harvesting soybeans and we are hauling them directly down to the river terminals for export.

Ewoldt sells his soybeans for export because that’s where he gets the best price. And lucky for him, his farm in Eastern Iowa is just a few miles from the nation’s most important grain shipping corridor. Flowing 2300 miles through the heart of the country, the Mississippi is the nation’s second-longest river. It’s also a super highway for American agricultural products. Around 60% of the grain exported from the US is sent down the river by barge to the Gulf Coast. For some farmers in Eastern Iowa like Ewoldt and his friend Joe Dierickx, access to the Mississippi is critical.

It’s very important. I mean, it’s a vital part of our operation.

The Mississippi River is really our lifeline for exporting around the world.

Usually, Ewoldt and Derek spend these harvest weeks driving nearly nonstop back and forth from their fields to grain elevators on the river. But this year, the routine was upended. Ewoldt’s semi-truck got stuck in two hour lines and Dierickx was told not to show up at all.

The elevator told me that they were full. They didn’t have a barge that they could dump any more beans into, and they were going to close at two o’clock.

Closing unexpectedly because the giant barges that are the main mode of transportation are having a hard time getting up the river. In October, water levels drop to the lowest ever recorded. The low levels are exposing the riverbed and rocks slowing down the thousands of barges that operate here.

I’ve dealt with low water before, but not this low.

Brandon Phillips is a towboat captain for the American River Transportation Company, or ARTCO, a subsidiary of agriculture Giant, ADM. With 2000 barges on the Mississippi, it’s one of the largest operators in the US.

Hey, I’ll be crossing the river, be on the one for you.

When we met Phillips in October, he just returned to St. Louis after 31 days straight on the river.

These are just our typical hopper barges. We’ll tie them together with steel cables, and then we’ll hook them up the boat and push them down river.

The barges fill up at river terminals like this one in St. Louis, where grain is trucked in to be weighed, then dumped and stored. A chute, delivers the grain into the barges, which are then tied together into huge fleets. Chad Hart is an agricultural economist at Iowa State University.

Now, as we’re thinking about the barge system, why do we rely on it so much is because it is the most cost-effective way for us to move our crops up and down a river.

According to a study by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, one barge can carry the same amount of dry cargo as 16 train cars or 70 trucks. Barges have a much smaller carbon footprint too.

So it’s an incredibly large amount of grain that you’re able to move quite easily and effectively down the river when we have full capacity along the Mississippi.

But this year, the barges are only carrying about two thirds of what they normally would. The lighter loads help them float higher in the water to avoid getting stuck on the river bottom. The low water also means the river is narrower. In a normal year, ARTCO could lash together 46 barges of grain for a trip south. This year, the most they can fit is 25.

We’re not loading the barges as heavy, so we have to make more trips. So you have more boats down there taking fewer barges, doing more laps.

And those laps are taking longer, in part because the shallow river is harder to navigate.

Here, you’ve got these two red triangles that tells me that it’s gotten shallow on the backside there. That tells you to take warning.

Even with the warnings, boats can run a ground, which could mean jamming up river traffic and turning a trip from St. Louis to New Orleans that normally takes five days into a nine-day voyage.

It’s a lot of work. It takes a lot of planning. It takes a lot of communication with other vessels because you have a lot more traffic to deal with. It’s nerve wracking. Even being as experienced as I am, I don’t have control over what other people do. I don’t necessarily have control over what Mother Nature does.

The barge problems caused prices for shipping on the Mississippi to spike this fall, right when farmers were trying to sell their grain. To make up for the increased freight costs, grain buyers lowered the price they offered farmers.

They pay us less. That cost is pushed back to the farmer.

You can’t turn around and pass that cost on to somebody else.

I would love to pass that on to somebody, but I can’t.

Joe Derek says he lost about $15,000 on his soybeans compared to last year. Robb Ewoldt is down around $25,000.

I don’t think anybody wants to take a $25,000 hit to their paycheck.

The issues on the Mississippi are adding to another problem. Over the last few years, high transportation costs have begun to hamper international trade. Contributing to higher prices for American goods, says economist, Chad Hart.

So it makes us less competitive in the international marketplace. Over the past couple of years, Argentina and Brazil have been able to erode our market share in certain key markets, especially as we look into China.

That the barges are still able to reach these markets at all, is thanks mostly to the US Army Corps of Engineers. Since mid-July, the Corps has been keeping the channel open by dredging, sucking out massive amounts of sand from the bottom of the river.

What we see is our dust pan. So our dust pan’s our vacuum cleaner, 35 feet wide.

Lou Dell’orco is the chief of operations for the Corps St. Louis District. He oversees this massive boat called the Dredge Potter, working near Scott City, Missouri. The boat moves this machine a huge vacuum around the bottom of the river.

Once the dredge sucks it up through the vacuum cleaner, it runs through a pipe. The pipe goes to the front of the dredge all the way out there. And there, it’s deposited outside of the channel. In an average day, we can move about 50,000 cubic yards or enough sediment to build an Olympic-sized swimming pool every hour.

A rotating crew of 35 people live on the boat for around three weeks at a time running the dredge, 24 hours a day.

This screen here, it shows you where we’re dredging at, where we’re digging.

It’s one of eight Army Corps dredging boats working on the Mississippi right now. Its hard work made harder by the fact that this vessel was built in 1932 and requires a lot of maintenance.

They’re maintaining a 91-year-old vessel, and there’s challenges abound, and the team keeps it together. Everybody’s dedicated to the mission, which is maintaining the channel which supports the nation’s economy.

Dell’orco’s team could be out here until winter when everyone hopes snow and rain will finally arrive and replenish the river, returning water levels and business back to normal.

(07:44)
For PBS News Weekend, I’m Megan Thompson in Scott City, Missouri.