Search - The Packer

Since farmers’ profits are dropping this year alongside crop prices, bridge-infrastructure needs have come into sharper focus.

North Dakota’s congressional delegation is pressing Canadian Pacific Railway to provide details of its backlog of grain shipments, saying farmers need detailed information with fall harvest fast approaching.

The new U.S. Rural Infrastructure Opportunity Fund is designed to connect rural projects in need of funding with interested investors and lenders.

“Rural infrastructure projects have built-in advantages that should be attractive to financiers. For starters, investment dollars go farther,” McGraw Hill Financial CEO Douglas L. Peterson wrote in an opinion piece for CNBC this week.

Rail congestion and large bounties of crops have some worried about grain storage space as South Dakota’s harvest gets underway.

A scale-tipping harvest, a lack of bin space from last year and a shortage of rail cars have some farmers, and some elevators, pouring wheat on the ground because there’s no place to put it.

The ripening corn and soybean fields stretch for miles in every direction from Dennis Wentworth’s farm in Downs, Illinois.

BNSF, which has come under scrutiny this year from the U.S. Surface Transportation Board over late grain deliveries, has told some oil shippers its network can’t accommodate more tank cars.

North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple opened a federal hearing in Fargo about rail service delays in the upper Plains by reading a letter from a grain elevator that said Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. was 525 cars behind in its service.

Sen. Heidi Heitkamp says farmers have been “tremendously patient” about rail delays, “but that patience is wearing thin.”