RANDOLPH, Iowa. (KMTV) — David Michaelis is the Location Manager for Heartland Co-op in Randolph, Iowa. With a full grain elevator, his biggest concern is where he will take all the grain?
"But I've never had dealt with such an inverse market like this. Where we need to ship grain faster than we can get it out and a bunch of our locations are full of grain. So I've never seen anything quite like this," said Michaelis.
Michaelis says full grain elevators raise big concerns with farmers.
"Farmers are always concerned, especially when they have grain yields. Are these elevators going to take our grain? Can we dump? What do we do? Do we go to a competitor? If we have to go to a competitor, it's 30, 40, 50 miles away," said Michaelis.
Iowa State Associate Professor Bobby Martens can't pinpoint a specific cause for the lack of trains. Suggesting it could be based on decisions railroads made to increase margins and efficiency on the tracks which aren't working how they intended.
"It's continuing to linger. So as it lingers longer and longer, we get to a point where there's more and more grain we want to have moved out by rail and it becomes a bigger and bigger issue," said Martens.
Martens insists that the current situation is a big deal to Iowa since it closes opportunities for us to merchandise and market grain to the rest of the world in a timely fashion.
"It has major implications for this fall if we don't get last year's crop marketed and out of the way before we have a potential corn crop coming in this coming fall. From an agricultural perspective, it impacts every person in the state of Iowa," said Martens.
Martens says there's a lot to be determined here. As we move through this, we will see how quickly rail will adjust what they are doing. But it is difficult to have a "feeling" of what this will look like three to six months from now.
Download our apps today for all of our latest coverage.
Get the latest news and weather delivered straight to your inbox.
