Shrunken Mississippi River Slows US Food Exports When World Needs Them Most

The Mississippi River in Greenville, Miss., on Nov. 1, 2022. Video: Rory Doyle/Bloomberg

Record-low water levels are causing major shipping jams just as the US needs to export this year’s harvest

By David R. Baker, Kim Chipman, Brian K. Sullivan and Michael Hirtzer

Graphics by Kyle Kim and Chloe Whiteaker

November 9, 2022, 7:00 PM EST

The Mississippi River — the immense, quiet highway that courses down the middle of America, moving critical food, wood, coal and steel supplies to global markets — is shrinking from drought, forcing traffic to a crawl at the worst possible time.

With water levels at record lows, barges have run aground, causing traffic jams as boats wait for the US Army Corps of Engineers to dredge a path through the shallows. The problem has been building for months. Summer brought meager rain to much of the Plains and Midwest. Now it’s harvest time, when farmers bring in their grains and other crops, send them to market, and lay down fertilizer before the winter snows. The shriveled Mississippi has forced them to seek alternatives, all of them more expensive, like moving soybeans by rail to the Gulf Coast or shipping everything through distant West Coast ports. That will inevitably increase pressure on global food prices at a time when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has already sent them soaring.

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The river is “low, been low and not getting filled anytime soon – so a bad situation getting worse,” said Jeremy Jack, who just harvested his crops on 11,500 acres of land in the Mississippi Delta. “We don’t have any soybean storage. Beans are in places where they shouldn’t be and losing quality.”

Note: Grains include soybean, corn, wheat, sorghum, oats, sunflower, barley, canola and flaxseed. Data are for countries that imported more than 10,000 metric tons between Nov. 4, 2021 and Nov. 3, 2022. Other ports include California, Chicago, Duluth, N. Atlantic, S. Atlantic, East Gulf, Lake Ontario and Toledo. Interior shipments include inspections conducted somewhere other than at an ocean port — typically land-based shipments to Mexico and Canada, as well as container shipments abroad.

Source: US Department of Agriculture Federal Grain Inspections

All told, the economic hit from the river’s historically low levels could reach $20 billion, according to AccuWeather.

As the shipping system grinds to a crawl, barge rates have soared. In the first week of November, shipping one ton of soybeans by barge from St. Louis cost $80.12, nearly 400% more than the year-earlier level. The rate jumped as high as $105.85 in mid-October. Prices have come down a bit after some rain in the central US, but it wasn’t anywhere near enough to end the crisis.

Note: Percent of average benchmark barge rate for shipments leaving upstream locations

Source: US Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Marketing Service

Coal from Appalachia and Illinois confronts the same bottleneck as grains, as the war forces Europe to hunt for fuel that can replace Russian natural gas. The river carried 71.7 million tons in 2020, according to the US Army Corps of Engineers, including much of the coal the US exports to fuel power plants in Europe and elsewhere.

Source: US Army Corps of Engineers’ Waterborne Commerce Statistics Center

“That coal is very much needed in Europe,” said Tracy Zea, chief executive officer of the Waterways Council, a Washington-based group that advocates for a robust US inland water transportation system.

The normal flow of fertilizers north on the river has also been blocked, crimping supplies and driving up costs for farmers. Soon, the Mississippi’s northernmost stretches will freeze for winter.

There have been barge groundings, and cruise ships have had to cut back.

“It’s affecting where we can travel,” said Captain William Lozier, president of Memphis Riverboats. “The river is a little less than half a mile wide instead of a mile.”

On a cloudy day, view of an exposed river bed, with the river in the background and a little shallow water splitting the sand in the foreground — The receding water levels have made parts of the Mississippi River impassable by boat.

Photographer: Houston Cofield/Bloomberg

By their natures, rivers change year by year, but low water has rarely been a problem on the Mississippi. The far more common concern has been too much water, forcing generations of engineers to build an elaborate system of levees, locks and spillways from Minnesota to Louisiana, making it one of the most controlled waterways on Earth. However, no amount of engineering can keep the river flowing if there isn’t enough water.

This year has seen rivers across the US, Europe and China shrinking amid scarce rains and high heat. The vaunted Colorado River, caught in the Southwest’s worst drought in 1,200 years, has dwindled to the point where its major hydroelectric dams are in danger of shutting down, threatening the booming desert cities that rely on it. In Argentina, the Parana River fell to its lowest levels in 77 years, crimping crop exports down the waterway, while Europe’s Rhine and Danube almost saw traffic halt. And even as a powerful monsoon season flooded Pakistan, drought in China dropped the Yangtze River low enough that glittering Shanghai had to turn off lights to save power. Together, they offer yet another example of how the world’s economy — the systems for generating electricity, moving products and providing food — relies on an increasingly unreliable climate.

“If we see continued bouts of insanely high water or low water, our products just become too expensive, and business naturally deteriorates,” said grain analyst Susan David, who traded physical grains in the US river market for over 15 years. “It is difficult to think of climate change killing off the inland river system, but look at what has happened in the West.”

This summer was drier than normal across much of the Great Plains and upper Midwest, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information. But it was September that pressed states bordering the Mississippi River and its tributaries toward deepening drought. A large part of the US from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico saw rains dry up, making it the 10th driest September on record. Twenty-three states recorded below-average rainfall, including every one that borders the Mississippi. Little rain fell in October. The remnants of Hurricane Ian provided only temporary relief.

Note: Drought snapshot for the week of October 25.

Source: US Drought Monitor

More than a trillion pounds of freight per year travel on the Mississippi and the rivers that feed it. Soybeans, corn, animal feed, coke, sand and gravel, oil, gasoline, fertilizer, salt and alcohol all ride the river to market. One of its major tributaries, the Ohio, is a conveyor belt for aluminum, coal and steel. A single river barge, fully loaded, can haul as much as 16 rail cars or 70 semi trucks, according to the US Department of Transportation. And most tugs that ply the river system push multiple barges.

A shrunken river changes those calculations. With water levels in some spots 11 feet below where they were a year ago, barges must carry less weight so they sit higher in the water. Even when traffic on the Mississippi hasn’t been blocked outright, barges have been forced to stop and offload part of their freight before they can proceed.

And yet, those lightly loaded barges have repeatedly run aground, creating traffic jams. Pinch points have emerged at Memphis, Stack Island near Vicksburg, Mississippi and Mound City, Illinois, just north of where the Ohio and the Mississippi rivers meet. Karl Ozinga’s cement company in Chicago had to stop a barge of supplies, blocking traffic, because it was too heavy to go through low points of the river. He started hunting for someone who could offload enough cement from the barge onto another to make the first one float, while the Army Corps dredged a channel.

“It’s a situation where, first of all, you have to figure out the whole scenario: Where’s the barge? What’s on it? How heavy is it loaded? Who can we get there and how fast can we get it done?” Ozinga said.

His family-run business has few alternatives. Ozinga can bring cement up the St. Lawrence River and through the Great Lakes to reach Chicago. But the shipments are smaller, because the locks along the route limit ship size. “You’ve got to bring three ships to the St. Lawrence to meet the demand of one ship to New Orleans,” he said. “In other words, it’s three times your cost.”

On a sunny day, view from the river under three steel bridge structures, with the pillars exposed due to low water levels — The Mississippi River was more than 8 feet below normal near Memphis in early November, as evidenced by the water residue stains seen from a riverboat tour on Sunday, Nov. 6, 2022.

Photographer: Houston Cofield/Bloomberg

Many farmers, however, don’t even have that option. They can’t easily switch to rail, and even if they could, the rail system is close to capacity, Zea said. Railways also face the lingering threat of a union strike. While more US growers have been adding grain storage on their farms to give them selling options year round, those near the river historically haven’t had as much of a need to do so. That may lead to a costly proposition of trying to find space now as grain elevators are backed up. Some with no alternative may simply have to put a tarp over recently harvested crops in a bid to shield them from the elements, said Mike Steenhoek, executive director of the Soy Transportation Coalition.

Meanwhile, US exports are already feeling the pinch. In mid-October, 51 ships in the Gulf of Mexico were waiting to berth and load commodities, including 42 grain vessels, Zea said, citing an internal analysis of the latest data. This time of year typically sees about 20 vessels queued up, he said. At the same time, on the river, 99 vessels with 1,369 barges were sitting at choke points, unable to pass.

“There’s a growing volume of crops that need to find a home and get to their destination,” Steenhoek said. “Everyone is looking for option B or C.”

Kenneth “Kenny” Hartman, a southern Illinois grower who relies solely on the Mississippi to ship his corn and soybeans, says trains and trucks aren’t realistic alternatives. So he saved extra bin space on his farm, about 25 miles from St. Louis, made some sales prior to harvest and tried to haul as much grain as possible to elevators earlier than he usually would have. But such workarounds have limits. A few weeks ago, he drove grain to a nearby elevator only to find it closed about three hours earlier than normal because it was already full.

The dry Mississippi is jacking up costs to move his grain while simultaneously lowering the price that grain can fetch domestically, since there’s a glut that can’t easily be shipped to foreign ports.

“When you start looking at the higher cost of fertilizer, the higher cost of seeds, the higher cost of fuel right now, it just compounds,” said Hartman, who has been farming since the early 1980s. “The profit isn’t what everybody thinks it is — and then the river situation just adds to that.”

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