Combing through this mornings transportation news I came across this article. Savage a 3PL is building a new IM ramp in Pocatello, ID. Though the target is international markets via the ports at SeaTac. This terminal sits adjacent to prime ag producing country. Greyhounds has mentioned this plenty times in the past of putting a ramp in these vicinities. Well UP has a chance to now go after the domestic traffic. Savage will build and OPERATE this terminal inside UP’s current yard. The plan currently is to ship 150 containers per week to the Northwest Alliance ports of Seattle and Tacoma. While this is geared for export. The domestic potential is even greater.
OK. That’s neat. I never would have imagined that you could send containers of hay from Idaho to asia and turn a profit.
Does the article make it sound like this operation is only loading the containers onto railcars? Someone else- the producer?- fills those conatiners with hay, etc.?
Yes the hay is loaded at the producer. Sounds like Savage is just building a ramp within UP’s current yard. At 150 containers a week. Probably a few side stackers on a gravel pad?. With these low volumes no need to buy a Mi-Jack crane.
For those who don’t know (like me), 3PL stands for Third Party Logistics. I’m surprised that Savage is getting into this. The few operations of theirs’ that I’m aware of are more industrial. They haul petcoke from the refineries around Torrance/San Pedro, CA and use 11-axle gravel trains to haul rocksalt from the Detroit Salt Mine.
I see this a just plain great for a lot of reasons. I’m also disturbed that the UP’s marketing people couldn’t/didn’t put this together themselves. They’re allowing other people to control the future of the railroad. Oh well, it’s better than nothing.
Did anyone else work on a hay rack behind a baler. The bales weighed around 75 pounds. They’d first mow the hay and then mechanically rake it into rows.
Then they’d hook up: 1) a farm tractor, 2) the baler, 3) a hay rack. On the rack were often two teen age boys. Our job was to pull the bales out of the baler with a hook and stack them on the hay rack as it moved through the field. We’d load up one rack, drop it, and hook on another empty rack. Then we had to unload 'em into the barn. It’s far more automated now.
That work, along with hoeing watermelons, made me opt for college.
The local farmer where I grew up had a John Deere baler that would automatically toss the bales into a wagon. The farmer could tilt the mechanism to compensate when going around corners, but sometimes would miss.
Indeed, I did. During summer vacation one year I joined my cousins baling hay for a week - made $19! Learned how to stack the bales so they’d stay stacked on the trip from the field to the barn.
Didn’t work in the mow, fortunately - that’s hot, dusty work.
“Kick” balers were all the vogue for quite a while. Hopefully the baler was doing a good job tying the bales or you got a heck of a mess.
The baler I dealt with had a metering problem - you’d get a nice “pony” bale out - short and easy to pitch - but the baler made up for it with the next bale, which would be long, heavy, and unwieldy.
These days most farmers around here are doing the big round or square bales. No pitching them.
My first experience with harvesting hay was a mowing machine with a seven foot sicyle. We then raked the hay and with a ‘buck rake’ we pushed it onto a stacker where the hay was thrown up onto what was to become a ‘hay stack’.
Started out in 6th grade at $1 per hour…BIG MONEY!
Ended my hay baling career going into Senior year of HS (1972) @ $2.50 to $3.00 per hour. BIGGER MONEY! I was in demand and would often work 5 days per week when the alfalfa was cut - usually 3 or 4 cuttings per season. Easy money was the straw baling, much lighter.
Tough aspect of the job was stacking the bales in the barn - attics were brutally hot and dusty.
One of my favorite memories was working for a dairy farmer and at the end of the day he would pull pure milk from his dairy cooler (just milked) and add chocolate powder. What a drink at the end of a hot day.
Greyhound, I do not see UP or others adding these types of facilities. Not in their bandwidth…but a regional or shortline could do it, as they look for transportation revenue, rather than railroad revenue. I do think these are better served by 3rd party providers that can tap into other aspects of the supply chain.
That operation was more refined than where I stacked bales. We had to pick them up off the ground, bounce them on a knee to get enough oomph to throw them on a hay wagon about 4 feet high. The guys on the wagon then stacked them. We also had to deal with the occasional rattle snake!
I’d have to believe that some of those containers are going to smell bad after being used to haul hay all the way to Asia.
Did that, too, if the wagons got too far behind with unloading, the baler would simply dump them on the ground. Sure does a number on a pair of jeans, though.
I also did the stacking on the haywagon and again in the mow. I did not grow up on a farm but “hired out” to help with hay. Hard work. But in my small Northeastern WI home town it paid off in the fall on the football field, at least.
There is demand for agricultural products in the Pacific rim. High rates of empty contaiers returning to Asia make for cheap freight. Currently, the manufacturers are often demanding containers return empty to get reloaded faster than messing with loading and unloading. This has created shortages of containers for loading of ag products.
Afalfa hay would not be shipped over in the small bales of our younger days. Most hay is not handled by hand anymore. The horse market is one stronghold for small bales. It would be baled in large rectangular bales in sizes up to 4 x 4 x 8 ft, weighing up to a ton. It is then compressed once more to reduce volume before container loading. Grass seed growers in the Pacific NW have long baled their grass straw after seed harvest, compressed it and sent it to Japan and Asia. Main ag exports from the Minot terminal would likely be dry peas, edible beans which are popular foods. Export Grain and oil seeds used for specialty human consumption are often shipped to small processors in containers. In short these are niche markets for ag. producers.
There is a HUGE demand in Asia for high quality animal feed. They simply can not produce enough to feed their animals for their own needs. I know of a farmer in my area that grows soybeans for export to Japan that are made into soy sauce in Japan. They grow a very specifc type of bean that the factory wants grow it organic and ship it all over to Japan for high end soy sauce. Another grows something that has made some cattle producer in Japan go I need more of this and is shipping tons of his grain over to Japan every year for Kobe Beef.
Out here on the plains, the Far East is a huge market for our products. We ship large amounts of grain, beef, and pork to China and Japan.
In the fall, a lot of grain sits in huge piles on the ground, waiting for train cars to haul it.
Even during the tariff issues several years ago, China continued to buy large amounts of grain from the Midwest U.S.
While hay bales provided employment for high school boys, today the small rectangular bales are almost gone. In their place are the huge round bales that can weigh up to 1,500 pounds.
A number of years ago, prior to the enlargement of CSX’s Virginia Avenue Tunnel, several Chichago-Florida merchandise trains got rerouted to head South via VAT and the I-95 corridor. The reroutes activated the High Car Detector that protected VAT - the cars that were found to be high were loads of Alfalfa Hay going from Larsen Farms in Idaho to Ocala, FL. Ocala is the heart of Florida horse country.
Unfortunately, I agree with you. The UP, and others, don’t have the “Bandwidth” to do this. They need to acquire more bandwidth.
The UP cannot just continue to sit back and hope that some day someone such as Savage will come along. They need to be proactive as Hell in developing new business. That hay has been moving for decades and the UP just sat back and waited for someone else to come up with a business development plan? ‘Tis pathetic.
They’ve got a railroad through Idaho. They probably know that. They should know what Idaho produces and consumes along with where it goes and where it comes from. Volumes and competing truck rates should also be known. They probably don’t know this “detailed” stuff. Kind of like a “What, me worry?” situation.
The business development plan can well include short lines, 3rd parties, etc. Whatever works the best. But the railroad needs to be proactive in the business development.
