Reply #4: It had better!

[akarnitz]

I've been posting about this on some other threads(maybe I should start one myself) so I hope I'm not boring anyone.

The Port of New Orleans is the key to grain transport from the nations bread basket. Say a farmer near fargo harvests 1000 bushels of wheat. He trucks it from Fargo to Minneapolis where the wheat is loaded onto a barge(with a lot of other wheat) and shipped to the Port of New Orleans. The truck route on the first leg(Fargo to Minneapolis)costs just as much as the-MUCH LONGER-barge route.

From New Orleans the grain is shipped to the Atlantic or Pacific seaboards(or overseas)to be distibuted(I believe the Midwest is serviced by truck/train). This is cheaper than overland delivery.

If overland routes are to be utilized, I have these questions:
1)Are there enough trucks or rolling stock(grain cars) to handle the demand?
2)Are there enough miles of road or rail to handle the demand?

Hell, I'm just talking about outgoing traffic here! One import I can point at is bananas. They are a time sensitive commodity. They're shipped from Central/South America to New Orleans and off-loaded onto rail cars. Port of New Orleans is the only port in the US serviced by as many as six class one railroads. Sure, you can ship to Houston or Tampa, but how long will it take to move those bananas north and west?

Maybe I'm wrong, but we could be getting some ugly inflation rates very soon.