Transportation in Agricultural Marketing

Excerpts from the report: Agricultural transportation is a dynamic link between widely scattered producing regions and the Nation's dining tables. A head of lettuce growing in California one week may be in a salad in New York City the next week. Broilers in a Chicago supermarket are often raised in Georgia, feed for them coming from the Midwest. Some of the milk consumed in Gulf States is produced by dairy cows in Wisconsin. A generation ago, these particular movements of products hardly existed. Their development illustrates the important role that transportation has played in agricultural marketing. Transporting farm products and supplies is a big job. In 1964, cost of transporting farm food products for civilian consumption alone totaled $5.1 billion. This was nearly double the 1950 estimate of $2.7 billion and almost $1 billion above the 1957-59 average of $4.2 billion. Since 1950, this transportation bill has accounted for just over 10 percent of the total marketing bill for farm food products. Railroads and trucks handle most of the business, which includes the equivalent of a million railroad carloads of fresh fruits and vegetables and nearly another million carloads of meat, to cite only two examples. This estimate of $5.1 billion does not include, by any means, all the costs of transporting agricultural products and supplies. Charges paid for transporting feed and fiber add a considerable amount to the total transportation bill, as do the charges for transporting farm production supplies. Shipments of agricultural products moving into industrial uses and into export channels further add to it, as do the shipments of food imported for domestic use.