Word: grained
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...desperation, some elevator owners, like Troyer, have been forced to ship grain by truck, though that method is so expensive that it eliminates all chance of making a profit on their investments. Ultimately, says Robert...
Wilson, the state's director of agriculture, the rail shortage will be translated into another assault on housewives' food budgets: "We've got a surplus of [old-crop] grain on the farm, but a shortage in the market. This drives up grain prices, which has a direct bearing on livestock feed-lot operators and eventually on consumers." Other commodities are being similarly afflicted; for instance, skyrocketing lumber prices have been blamed partly on a heavy demand for railroad flatcars to haul wood from mill to housing sites...
...congestion began late last summer, after the U.S. agreed to sell Russia 733 million bushels of grain, putting an unexpected strain on railroad facilities. The situation worsened when delays in transferring the grain from railroad cars onto ocean carriers held up Russian shipments until November -just in time to coincide with one of the biggest grain harvests in U.S. history and an unprecedented demand by European countries for American produce. The big surge of new orders further clogged U.S. harbors with ships, delaying unloading of grain-laden hopper cars even more. Then Mother Nature stepped in, sending the Mississippi over...
Even without this spring's peculiar catastrophes, there might still have been a rail capacity crisis. Simply put, the roots of the big back-up are a shortage of railroad grain cars and the inefficient methods by which those already in service are operated. The railroads are trying to remedy the first problem by ordering record numbers of grain cars...
...through the maze of Government and union rules (for example, laws that prohibit rail crews from working more than twelve hours a day even with overtime) that prevent the most efficient use of cars. A consortium of railroaders, union leaders, elevator operators and farm economists who met at the Grain Movement '73 Conference in Chicago last week placed most of the blame for the jam on the Federal Government for overloading the rails with the Russian grain. They think new laws are needed to modernize and better coordinate the interlocking parts of the transportation system. But the remedies, even...