Mike Steenhoek, director of the Soy Transportation Coalition, thought the Mississippi could avoid a fourth consecutive year of low water levels.
More than half of American soybeans depend on the Mississippi River as an export channel. But no significant rainfall is forecast for the lower half of the Mississippi, which could hinder the transport of goods, like soybeans.
“A lot of the Midwest has received a pretty substantial amount of rainfall, particularly in spring, and really through the middle part of August, drought conditions have reversed considerably,” he said. “But yet we find ourselves in some low water conditions on the lower part of the river.”
He says that’s because of another important source of water for the Mississippi — the Ohio river. Both water bodies meet up in Cairo, Ill., after which point 60 percent of the Mississippi’s water volume comes from the Ohio.
But throughout August, rainfall in states that feed into the Ohio has decreased, increasing concerns of potential low water levels for the Mississippi.
When the river’s water levels are low, barges have to reduce their load capacity to avoid scraping the ground with their hulls. In turn, fewer barges go through the channel at the same time. All of this makes exporting soybeans through the Mississippi more expensive for producers.
Steenhoek said farmers could instead opt to drive long distances to possibly feed into an area with livestock production or to access a rail loading facility for South American markets.
“So there are additional options, but again, you’re migrating to less favorable options,” Steenhoek said. “Which means there’s going to be a profitability lost anytime that occurs.”
Dredging a path forward
The Department of Transportation refers to river channels such as the Mississippi “marine highways.” Gary Williams, executive director of the Upper Mississippi Waterway Association, said we should treat them as real highways.
“The waterway is vital for trade and export and it needs to be looked at as being a working waterway and maintained and kept up to date, much like our highway system on the roadways needs to be,” Williams said.
He said that means funding the army corps of engineers to continue dredging the riverbed to keep up with low water levels for barges to move up and down the river.
He said this should happen before the river’s water levels get low in order to be prepared.
“You’re cheering on the Corps of Engineers to keep dredging deeper and deeper, to keep all the traffic moving,” Williams said. “But we’ve seen it before with low water conditions when it returns, it requires redoubled efforts or greater from the Army Corps, to keep everything running.”
Options are running thin
If rain fails to come, soybean producers whose crops travel on the Mississippi could see themselves stuck in between a rock and a hard place.
University of Minnesota soybean agronomist Seth Naeve said the state’s farmers tend to have two main options to move their product: the first is through the Mississippi down to the Gulf of Mexico, and the second is on railways headed towards ports in the Pacific Northwest that export to Asian markets.
But China, the country’s biggest soybean buyer, hasn’t placed a single order for the upcoming market year.
“So now, if we have soybeans that are backed up because of shipments down the Mississippi River, that puts increasing pressure from the other direction,” Naeve said. “That means farmers in between those two areas might be affected more severely because they’re caught in the pinch between both of those potential export problems.”
The Department of Agriculture projected record corn and soybean yield for 2025. With so much crop production underway, Naeve said it’s pressing for farmers to have somewhere to sell their crops to.
“All of this stuff just tends to slow traffic at a time when we were hoping that we could push more soybeans through the Mississippi River,” Naeve said. “We don’t need additional challenges at this time.”
