With our tow boat and 15 barges filled with corn, wheat and soybeans now heading downstream, Captain Rider says 100 miles represents a good day on the Upper Mississippi River. South of St. Louis on the 730-mile journey to New Orleans and with no locks to slow down the tow, it's a different story.

Barge design and positioning affect efficient movement on the Mississippi River. But when aging infrastructure brings barges to a standstill for as long as 12 hours, all the design in the world can't save what amounts to $100 million in delay-related costs. If the U.S. is going to move twice as much grain to market 20 or 30 years from now, we'll need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to update the river's ancient system of locks.

When Jason Lay attended a conference last year with other Illinois farmers, he was amazed by the level of interest in strip-till, a system in which the crop is planted in a narrowly tilled strip and most crop residue is preserved to protect the soil from erosion.