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Ag Products Take Different Rides to Seaports by Steve Brown Capital Press, September 1, 2011

Highest standards set for transporting food for human consumption

TACOMA, Wash. -- Agricultural products can take many roads to get from farm to port. The two major ones are by containers or in bulk.

Maersk Line, a major shipping company, specializes in containers, which can be transported by truck or by train. Maersk has placed an order with South Korea's Daewoo

Shipbuilding for the largest container ships ever built. Andrew Hemp, agricultural marketing representative for Maersk, described the advantage of containers at the recent meeting of the Midwest Shippers Association.

"The container can go directly from the silo to the customer's warehouse," he said. "This is great for smaller markets, and it's more flexible than break-bulk operations," in which cargo is shipped by bags, bales, cartons, drums or pallets.

Hemp said more and more ag products are source-loaded at elevators.

Maersk has also invested in transloading facilities, where a shipment is transferred from one mode of transportation to another, and trans-shipping, where it changes from one conveyance to another.

Steve Kennedy, bulk manager at MacMillan-Piper, a trans-shipping specialist at the Port of Tacoma, showed how that operation works.

At the dockside facility, a railroad hopper car delivered identity-preserved soybean isolates, processed by Cargill in Bloomington, Ill. The product was loaded by stainless-steel auger into 55,000-pound containers for shipment to a customer in Japan for infant formula. One hopper car filled three containers. About 11,000 railcars a year deliver to MacMillan-Piper.

"The bulk containers for human consumption have extremely high standards for seals and cleanliness," Kennedy said.

Chris Cuiskelly, marine operations superintendent at Tacoma's Pierce County Terminal, said about 700 containers a day are trucked into his facility.

"There are 900 to 1,000 in better economic times," he said.

The new Export Grain Terminal, the soon-to-be-operational port at Longview, Wash., is designed around the automated handling of bulk grain. Like coal and other aggregates, bulk grain can be loaded and discharged rapidly.

"The new facility has the newest technology," CEO Larry Clarke said. "It's the only one so automated."

Shipping in bulk is cheaper than by container, he said. The only time containers were cheaper was 2008, when empty containers were sent back to Asia.

The Longview facility is large enough to handle 110-car unit train configurations, as well as barges on the Columbia River. With 36 silos, a 4.7 million-bushel capacity and robotic car openers, the facility can unload a train within four hours.

Jim Pratt, director of marketing for Triton Container International, spoke about container availability. Volume dropped about 25 percent as economies contracted, and midsize ocean carriers were losing $2 million a day. About 1.75 million TEUs (20-foot-equivalent units) were retired, he said.

As shipping rebounded in 2010, the number of containers came up short. "2011 is still tight globally," Pratt said, "and it is still soft the first half."

With Asian exports down and carriers still losing money, "We expect little change in container availability, with lots of competition for available containers," he said. "It will be tight for some time to come. Imports are the key."