December 22, 2020
IARN The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released a report, The Importance of Highways to U.S. Agriculture, prepared in close partnership with the Department of Transportation (DOT). The report was researched and written by DOT’s Volpe National Transportation Systems Center through a cooperative agreement overseen by USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) and its Transportation Services Division.
Agricultural producers are the single largest user of freight services, comprising 17% of freight movements across all transportation modes in dollar value and 33% of all ton-miles (U.S. DOT, BTS, and U.S. Census Bureau, 2017). In 2017, 2.9 billion tons of agricultural products worth $2.5 trillion moved on the freight network.
2. U.S. corn is flying off of the shelves U.S. corn is leaving the country as quickly as it can be loaded, with 12,053,200 metric tons (MT) (nearly 475 million bushels) already sold and delivered in marketing year 2020/2021 and another 29,526,600 MT (nearly 1.2 billion bushels) waiting to head to their overseas destinations as of Dec.12, 2020, according to the U.S. Grains Council (USGC). In a weekly statement to members Thursday, the USGC noted that the total of sales yet to be shipped and those that have been delivered is up by 242% over the last marketing year at this time, driven by increased sales to each of the top five 2020/2021 buyers including China, which is up 19,521% alone.