Growing up on a Wisconsin dairy farm near the Mississippi River, Randy Kirschbaum had no clear idea of what he wanted to do with his life. It only took one day on the river for him to make up his mind.

When Randy Kirschbaum was 18 his father, who worked in a boat yard in addition to farming, took him for a short ride on a harbor boat. “I knew immediately that this was where I wanted to work,” he recalls. “Growing up on a farm around machinery all the time, it was sort of a natural progression.”
Within a month of that first ride he had a job as a deckhand on a boat and in the next 25 years worked his way up to first mate, then captain. His career has taken him back and forth across the world of corn on every major navigable river in the heart of the United States.
From that perspective, Kirsch-baum sees an aging Mississippi River system in need of significant upgrades. “I’ve run all the 600-foot locks on the Mississippi and I’ve been through the 1,200-foot locks on the Ohio River,” he says. “The difference is amazing. On the Mississippi, it takes and hour and half to push a barge through; on the Ohio, you go through in 15 minutes.”
Kirschbaum points out that a towboat burns 200 to 300 gallons of fuel an hour and compares idling for an hour at the lock, to pulling a grain truck up to an elevator and letting it idle there for two days. “We try to be as efficient as we can, but idling adds unnecessary costs to shipping corn.”
Those unnecessary costs make U.S. corn more expensive on the global grain markets and lead to lost trade opportunities.
He sees the Mississippi lock-and-dam system as long overdue for an overhaul. “These locks were designed with a 50-year life-span. We’re eventually looking at major failures,” Kirschbaum reflects. “We understand the need for improvements and corn growers understand it. But we need to get the general public to understand the need.”
Kirschbaum wants the public to know that for every barge taken off the river, 60 semi-trailer trucks would have to be added to the highway system. “If you don’t spend money on the locks, you’re going to eventually add traffic to the highways and emissions to the air.”
That puts more pressure on the whole transportation infrastructure.
“Corn growers and the inland transportation system have a lot in common,” Kirschbaum concludes. “We’re quiet industries. We do a good job at what we do, but we need to get the word out about how important our jobs are. Spread the word.”