"Of course, the changing of the crops to more corn has provided more volume, which has helped these facilities."ĬHS is developing a terminal near Gwinner, N.D., and James Valley Cooperative of Oakes, N.D., has a planned loader near Verona, N.D. "I'd think we'd have to be reaching a saturation point," Berwick says. Mark Berwick, a part-time UGPTI research associate who lives in Moorhead, Minn., and farms in northeast Montana, says he was part of a research team that in the early 2000s predicted North Dakota could handle 16 shuttle loaders - less than a third of the 56 in existence today. "We're far more rail-dependent than most of our peer states," Vachal says. ![]() North Dakota has seen more corn and soybean expansion and much of that is for export to the Pacific Northwest ports, so the state took a large part in the nationwide shuttle-building boom. Montana, for example, is much more export-oriented, but the shuttle loaders are more widely dispersed because the major commodity is wheat, which has lower yield per acre than corn. The situation in each state in the region is different. Some of the BNSF incentive programs have scaled back, and most of the recent expansions are by companies that buy grain, such as Dakota Plains Ag, rather than producer-funded projects, Vachal says. "Fewer of these investments now are with the traditional cooperatives," Vachal says, although some are with much larger cooperative systems. ![]() Shuttle mania started in the late 1990s and accelerated more in 2005, as corn production advanced, through 2010. Kim Vachal, a senior researcher with the Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute in Fargo, N.D., confirms the trend toward expansion to handle more shuttle train capacity has slowed in Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota and Montana. Winsand says the company's research indicates there might be only two or three shuttle service deficit areas left in South Dakota.
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