American Commercial Lines, an Indiana-based barge company, has orders to ship southern corn through the end of August to locations on the Ohio, Illinois and upper Mississippi rivers, and into St. Louis, spokeswoman Kim Durbin said.
Barge companies are equipped to carry grain north because they usually ship fertilizer from the south to Midwest farms. Grain elevators, which are more accustomed to loading corn than unloading it, are having to adapt.
The Illinois and Ohio rivers, which flow through the areas worst hit by last summer’s drought, have already seen increases in upriver barge shipments of food and food products.
Northbound traffic passing through the LaGrange lock, the southernmost on the Illinois River, was up 9.5 percent from a year ago through the end of July.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which manages the lock system, said the volume moving upriver through the JT Meyers lock on the lower Ohio River, the lock nearest its confluence with the Mississippi, was up 4 percent from a year ago as of the end of July.