Transport & Storage

The harvest exists in one place. The consumer is somewhere else. Moving food between them — and storing it for the months or years between harvest and consumption — is one of the most capital-intensive and logistically complex operations in the American economy. It is also one of the most invisible to the people it serves.

What It Is

Transport and storage is the physical bridge between the farm and the processor: the trucks, rail cars, barges, grain elevators, cold storage warehouses, and refrigerated trailers that move hundreds of millions of tons of agricultural product annually. This infrastructure is the reason Americans can buy California strawberries in January and Florida orange juice in Montana.

How It Works

Three transport modes carry American agricultural output from farm to processor, each with fundamentally different economics, capacities, and ecological footprints.

Trucking is the first and last mile of nearly everything. Almost 100% of farm-to-elevator, processor-to-distribution-center, and last-mile grocery deliveries move by truck. For perishable products — produce, meat, dairy — the truck is the entire cold chain: a refrigerated trailer (“reefer”) that maintains precise temperatures from the packing shed to the distribution dock. A reefer unit runs on a secondary diesel engine independent of the main truck engine, burning fuel continuously whether the truck is moving or parked.

Rail handles long-distance bulk commodity movement. Covered hopper cars carry grain from Midwest elevators to domestic processors and coastal export terminals. The economics favor rail strongly over long distances — a 110-car shuttle train moves more grain with less fuel than hundreds of trucks. But US Class I railroads have adopted “Precision Scheduled Railroading” (PSR) — a management philosophy that runs fewer, longer trains on rigid schedules to maximize shareholder returns. For agricultural shippers, who need cars when the harvest is ready rather than on a schedule, PSR has been frequently devastating: rural elevators have waited weeks for promised railcars while grain piled up outdoors.

Inland waterways — primarily the Mississippi River system — are the competitive advantage of US agricultural exports. One 15-barge tow, pushed by a single diesel towboat, carries the equivalent of approximately 870 semi-trucks (US Army Corps of Engineers). The carbon footprint per ton-mile is the lowest of any transport mode. This system was engineered by the Army Corps of Engineers beginning in the 1930s with a 50-year design life. Many of its locks and dams are operating well past that horizon, maintained by an ongoing program of patches and prayers. A single lock failure during peak autumn harvest can halt millions of tons of grain movement and immediately spike prices paid by international buyers.

Grain elevators are not just storage — they are precision blending facilities. Wet grain arriving at harvest is mixed with dry grain; high-protein wheat is blended with low-protein wheat to hit exact contractual specifications. Stored grain is a living, breathing biological system: if moisture and temperature are not controlled by automated aeration systems, it can mold, heat, and in extreme cases, spontaneously combust.

Why It Matters

The cold chain is both the system’s greatest achievement and a significant ecological cost. The unbroken temperature-controlled environment from harvest to retail is what makes fresh produce available year-round across a continent. It also means that an avocado shipped from Mexico to Minnesota has passed through several refrigerated environments, each running on diesel.

Driver shortage is the system’s most acute human bottleneck. The average commercial truck driver is 47 years old — notably older than the overall US workforce median of approximately 42 — and retirements are accelerating (ATRI, 2025). Younger workers are not entering the profession in sufficient numbers. The consequences flow upstream: freight rates rise, transit times grow less predictable, and the food system’s just-in-time logistics face growing exposure to unpredictability that they were not designed to absorb.

What’s Being Done

The problems above are real and in some cases worsening — but the infrastructure for change is already in place in ways that rarely make the news. Federal money is flowing to the locks that have moved grain since FDR was president, driverless trucks are hauling food on Texas highways today, and electric reefer units are rolling out of factories in commercial quantities. The question is whether these efforts get the policy support and market adoption needed to scale before the next crumbling lock, vacated rail rule, or driver retirement creates a crisis.

Efforts Showing Results

Lock & Dam 25 New 1,200-Foot Lock (IIJA-funded). Congress allocated $732 million from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to construct a new 1,200-foot lock chamber at Lock & Dam 25 near Winfield, Missouri, replacing the Depression-era 600-foot lock that creates the worst bottleneck on the upper Mississippi export corridor. First concrete was poured in November 2023; the project is currently on schedule and slightly under budget. A modern 1,200-foot lock allows full double-lockage of modern tow configurations, dramatically reducing the transit delays that ripple into global commodity prices during peak harvest. The broader NESP portfolio of seven projects faces a funding gap due to inflation and cost overruns, and Congress will need to appropriate supplemental funds to ensure companion projects don’t stall. (US Army Corps of Engineers; Waterways Council)

Aurora Innovation Commercial Driverless Trucking. Aurora launched fully commercial driverless Class 8 truck operations in Texas in May 2025, with McLane Company — one of the largest food distribution companies in the US — among its first customers. By Q3 2025, Aurora had logged 250,000+ driverless miles with zero Aurora Driver-attributed collisions, and is targeting 200 trucks and an $80M revenue run rate by end of 2026. These trucks can legally operate 24 hours a day without a mandated rest break, which is directly relevant to the driver shortage math. Current deployment covers sunbelt interstate corridors, not rural grain elevator routes, but the commercial viability threshold has been crossed — the next step is expanding the regulatory and operational framework to agricultural supply chain lanes. (TechCrunch)

Electric Trailer Refrigeration Units (eTRUs). Thermo King’s e1000 all-electric reefer unit and Carrier Transicold’s Vector eCool system are commercially available and in active fleet trials with Walmart, Loblaws, United Natural Foods, and Martin Brower. Electrifying one diesel reefer has the equivalent pollution impact of removing 141 passenger cars from the road, and saves approximately 30 liters of diesel per operating day. The economics at distribution hubs with overnight plug-in access are increasingly compelling. Widespread adoption across the full cold chain is a 10-15 year horizon at current pace — accelerating it requires freight charging infrastructure at food distribution hubs and the kind of fleet procurement commitments that large grocers are already beginning to make. (Thermo King)

Wisconsin Agricultural Roads Improvement Program (ARIP). Established in June 2023, Wisconsin’s ARIP provides competitive grants covering up to 90% of project costs for counties to repair local roads, bridges, and culverts serving agricultural production. The program funded 120 projects in 56 of 72 Wisconsin counties in its first two years, with 92% of award routes identified as the only feasible access to farm or processing facilities. The 2025-27 budget added another $150 million. No equivalent federal program exists, but Iowa, Minnesota, and North Dakota legislators now have a proven template and documented constituent demand to replicate it. (Wisconsin DOT ARIP)

Where More Work Is Needed

Captive agricultural shippers have no viable remedy after reciprocal switching rule vacatur. The STB’s 2024 reciprocal switching rule — the only near-term regulatory check on PSR service failures for agricultural shippers captive to a single railroad — was vacated by the Seventh Circuit in July 2025. Most country elevators have no practical alternative to their single Class I carrier, and railroads are already testing the limits: BNSF hiked grain switching rates by up to 472% in 2026, triggering a new STB complaint. A proposed Union Pacific-Norfolk Southern merger would further consolidate from five to four major freight railroads. Congressional legislation explicitly authorizing reciprocal switching — removing the court vulnerability that killed the 2024 rule — is the most structurally sound near-term fix. The agricultural coalition opposing the UP-NS merger is the most active lever available right now, with STB comment periods active through 2026.

NESP funding gap threatens the companion lock projects that Lock 25 depends on. The IIJA’s $829 million was historic, but inflation and supply chain overruns have left the full seven-project inland waterways portfolio underfunded. The Inland Waterways Trust Fund’s 29-cent-per-gallon barge fuel tax — unchanged since 1995 — generates roughly $125 million per year, far short of what major lock construction requires. The Waterways Council calculates Lock 25 alone needs at least $250 million in the next fiscal year to stay on schedule. A supplemental emergency appropriation framed as food security infrastructure, paired with a long-overdue increase in the inland waterways user fee, would put the broader program on a sustainable footing before a failure at one of the remaining aging locks forces a more expensive emergency response.

Electric freight faces a structural weight penalty for maximum-payload agricultural loads. Battery packs in current electric Class 8 trucks weigh 8,000–16,000 lbs more than equivalent diesel powertrains. Federal law allows only a 2,000-lb interstate weight exemption, and for grain, livestock, and fertilizer loads that routinely operate at the 80,000-lb federal limit, this battery weight directly displaces payload. The economics break down for agricultural haulers who depend on maximum payload density. Near-term solutions include prioritizing electric truck deployment on shorter agricultural routes (under 150 miles) where payload displacement is less economically damaging, and investing in battery-swap or fast-charge depot infrastructure along major agricultural corridors to allow smaller battery packs with more frequent recharging.

The people who move food from field to table have been navigating crumbling locks, unreliable rail cars, and deteriorating roads for decades with remarkable ingenuity. The tools to do it better — electric reefers, driverless trucks, a rebuilt lock, a functioning competitive switching rule — either exist or are close to existing. What determines whether those tools reach scale is not technology. It is whether the institutions managing this system apply the authority they have, and whether the people with direct stakes insist, persistently and specifically, that they do. The food system that feeds 330 million people runs on infrastructure most of those people never see. Seeing it clearly is where the work starts.