The season’s first grain ship loaded this week at the Port of Duluth-Superior. The 620-foot Solina is bound for Algeria with 720,000 bushels of durum wheat.
That’s the equivalent of about 200 train cars of grain, grown on about 20,000 acres of farmland in the Upper Midwest, said Daniel Vandenhouten, operations manager at CHS Terminal in Superior, Wis. It’s one of several grain terminals in the port.
The CHS facility stores grain in about 500 towering concrete silos that fill 35 to 40 ships with grain every year.
The Duluth-Superior port is a small player in the ag export business, but it's important for some crops like durum grown in northern Minnesota, the Dakotas and Montana. Durum is milled into semolina flour, primarily used to make pasta and couscous.
Grain exports from Duluth-Superior have been down significantly the past couple of years.
That's because fewer ships brought products into the Great Lakes from other countries.
“And vessels aren't going to come all the way from Europe empty-handed all the way to the Great Lakes,” said Vandenhouten. “There really needs to be something being imported locally so we can have the opportunity to backhaul it with grain going back to Europe or North Africa.”
A boutique port
Those limitations will continue to slow exports from the Duluth-Superior port, but some ag groups are hoping for more opportunities to export specialty crops.
“We would consider that Superior will remain the boutique corridor that it is today,” said Brian Schouvieller, a senior vice president for CHS Ag Group.
Exports could incrementally expand for identity-preserved grains that have stringent quality requirements, or specialty crops like beans, said Schouvieller.
“That [market] continues to grow as consumers appreciate understanding more about where their food is coming from and what's in their food and they’re willing to pay a slight premium for that,” he said.
Those specialty crops could also benefit from an expansion of container shipping.
In 2021, the port of Duluth announced a significant expansion of capacity to ship containers.
About a year ago, Wisconsin-based Chippewa Valley Bean company shipped its first container loads of kidney beans from the port.
“We are the largest processor and exporter of kidney beans in the world,” said Charles Wachsmuth, company vice president. Most of the kidney beans the company exports are grown in northern Minnesota.
A top destination is Italy. The company faced hurdles throughout the pandemic with shipping container and rail traffic delays, said Wachsmuth. The primary export route has been moving the beans by rail to Montreal and then by ship to their final destination.
“The idea of using the Twin Ports and Duluth is a game-changer for us,” he said. “It provides multiple months out of the year that we can get regular service from Duluth to ports in Europe.”
But realizing that potential will take time, said Wachsmuth, because the agriculture industry alone can’t provide enough containers to regularly fill ships.
“It's going to take a collaboration and cooperation amongst all industries, not just agriculture to really bring up the Twin Ports to capacity,” he said.
Deep water advantage
Soybeans and corn are the top ag exports from Minnesota. Most of that grain flows west to ports in the Pacific Northwest or south to ports on the Gulf of Mexico.
Those deep-water ports can fill much larger ocean-going ships, making transportation more cost-effective.
CHS has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in those port facilities.
TEMCO — a joint venture with CHS and Minnesota-based agribusiness giant Cargill — owns several port facilities in the Pacific Northwest and recently purchased a facility in Houston.
CHS is also expanding a port facility in Louisiana, said John Griffith, senior vice president for global grain marketing.
“And it gives us great flexibility to provide competitive prices to U.S. farmers and give them a full suite of options to market their grain any place in the world,” he said.
Source: dglobe.com
Photo Credit: GettyImages-Art Wage
Categories: Minnesota, Business, Crops, Wheat