Rural Infrastructure Needs Must Be Addressed
Every year since 1998, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the nation’s oldest engineering association (established in 1852), issues a report card on the state of public infrastructure in the United States. In its 2021 report card, released on April 15, ASCE gave the United States an overall grade of C-, a slight improvement over the D+ issued in 2017. The report found that 37 states have increased their gas taxes to fund transportation investments since 2010, and 98 percent of local infrastructure ballot initiatives were approved by voters in the 2020 general election.
However, much work remains to be done, especially in infrastructure categories that are vital to rural America in general and farmers in particular. The ASCE report also gives letter grades to individual categories of infrastructure, and many of them located in rural America, such as inland waterways, dams, roads, and bridges, fall into the “C” or “D” categories. Only in railroads and ports, which are largely funded by the private sector and not major recipients of public financing, are the grades better, rated as “B” and “B-” respectively.
In aggregate, the ASCE estimates that the U.S. government is only paying about half of what is needed to maintain and improve our public infrastructure, with the 10-year gap in investment growing to nearly $2.6 trillion.
One area that has long been the focus of U.S. farm and commodity groups is the lock and dam system on the navigable portions of the Mississippi River system. In 2020, four Midwest states accounted for 54 percent and 42 percent of U.S. corn and soybean production respectively--Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, and Nebraska. More than 80 percent of all U.S. corn and soybeans are produced in the Midwest, all of which fall within the Mississippi River basin system. More than 60 percent of grain destined for export moves downriver via barge transport, primarily through Gulf ports in the New Orleans, LA area. After touring many of the lock sites on the Illinois River earlier this year that are currently being renovated, farmer members of the National Corn Growers noted that several dozen of the locks along the river system are 80 years old, well beyond their planned design age of 50 years.
Many rural roads and bridges are also in need of repair and upgrades. In a 2020 report published by TRIP, a national transportation research non-profit, they found that 34 percent of the nation’s roads in rural areas are in poor or mediocre condition, and eight percent of rural bridges are in poor or structurally deficient condition.
The Interstate highway system, which carries a lot of agricultural products moved by truck over long distances, is also facing problems. While making up less than 3 percent of the country’s road miles, it carries more than one quarter of all traffic nationally. In May of 2021, a safety inspector discovered a massive crack in the Hernando de Soto bridge that carries I-40 traffic over the Mississippi River near Memphis, TN, forcing the bridge to shut down to vehicle traffic for several months while it is repaired. The discovery also led to a brief shutdown of barge traffic on the river below, until it was determined that the bridge was not at risk of imminent collapse. The bridge was built 48 years ago. A 2019 report by TRIPS on the interstate highway system found that most roadways in the system still have their original underlying foundations installed during the 1950’s and 1960’s, and need to be rebuilt from the subbase up.
One area that has received relatively little attention in recent years is the need to upgrade research facilities at the nation’s land grant universities. Over the decades, the work of scientists using those laboratories and other facilities has been vital to maintaining the steady gains in agricultural productivity that U.S. farmers have benefited from over the past century. A recent review of the status of those facilities by the Association for Public and Land Grant Universities (APLU) found that across the country, 69 percent of the buildings at U.S. colleges and schools of agriculture are at the end of their useful life. In recent years, the United States has fallen behind China in its provision of public funding for agricultural research, and a significant investment is needed in this area, in terms of both manpower and modern research facilities, for us to remain competitive in global agricultural markets.
Despite recent investments, rural areas still lag well behind urban areas in terms of access to reliable high-speed broadband services. According to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC), 31 percent of rural Americans do not have access to high speed internet at home. The shift to remote learning for American students that was necessary as a public health measure to combat the novel coronavirus has exposed yet another cost of the digital divide for rural households. Farmers in areas with little or no broadband access also are hampered in their ability to make use of precision agriculture technology that can help them apply a range of inputs such as fertilizer, herbicide, and irrigation water more efficiently.
President Biden is now in negotiations with Senate Republicans to craft a bipartisan legislative package with significant investments in the kinds of infrastructure, as described above, that are so important to rural lives.
