After a recent tour of locks and dams and watching barges transport product via the Mississippi River, Kevin Paap, Minnesota Farm Bureau president, said the water transportation infrastructure would benefit from updates and repairs.

“We have 42 locks on 37 sites on 1,200 miles of the Mississippi, Ohio and Illinois Rivers,” he said. “Sixty-five percent of total U.S. exports go down the river. So transportation is very important.”

LEARNING MORE ABOUT LOCKS AND DAMS: Kevin Paap, Minnesota Farm Bureau president and chairman of the American Farm Bureau Federation Trade Advisory Committee, recently toured the locks and dam system near St. Louis, Mo.

Paap, who also chairs the American Farm Bureau Federation Trade Advisory Committee, attended a recent committee meeting in St. Louis, Mo., that included an infrastructure tour along the Mississippi River in the city. The tour helped committee members learn more about the river’s locks and dam system.

The newest lock on the Mississippi River is north of St. Louis and located at the Melvin Price locks and dam site. A new 1,200-foot lock was built and saw its first barge go through in 1989. There also is an older 600-foot lock there, too.

That’s the challenge with the river transportation system today — locks are too small for barges going through. Typically, a barge tow consists of 15 big flat-bottom barges, connected together in a formation three barges wide by five barges long, Paap said. With most locks only 600 feet in size, that requires the towboat to stop the barges, uncable them and allow nine barges to go through, tie them upstream and go back for the remaining six barges. The whole process to fill and empty the locks and to move barges takes two-and-a-half to three hours. However, when a barge tow goes through a 1,200-foot lock, it remains together and is through in less than 30 minutes.

The aging lock and dam system also is a concern for those who rely on it for transporting product.

“We want to update them, but we’ve got a ‘fix it as it fails’ process. That is not good strategy,” Paap added.

He noted, too, that there are 24 locks between Minneapolis and St. Louis. Of those, only two are 1,200-foot locks.

“People don’t realize why locks and dams exist because they usually don’t see them,” he said.

According to a 2013 report, the American Society of Civil Engineers said that nearly half of the nation’s 257 locks were classified as functionally obsolete. By 2020, more than 80% will be functionally obsolete, it noted. On the Upper Mississippi and Illinois River system, 57% of the locks were built in the 1930s — with a projected 50-year lifespan.