Coming up to lock number five at Minnesota City, Minn., tow boat pilot Tom Persons tells us the crew always needs to be cautious. These tow boat jobs are extremely dangerous and require special skills with an extremely high emphasis on safety.

Sitting in the tow boat wheelhouse, Captain Rider tells us barging grain is definitely the most efficient way of moving Midwestern-grown crops to southern U.S. ports for export. To back up his claims, he shares data compiled by the Iowa Department of Transportation.

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.

Aging locks, inadequate lock size, increasing channel dredging needs, critical repair needs, chronic budget shortfalls and concerns in coordinating overseas shipments with restricted river availability are major worries on most of our nation's rivers. Built to last 50 years, many of the Upper Mississippi River locks are already more than 70 years old. As a result, the American Society of Civil Engineers has given a D-minus grade to the deteriorating physical condition of the Mississippi River navigable waterways.

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.

Farmers effectively grow and market their crops, but the grain still has to be transported to its final destination. Sometimes, this is a food processing plant 89 miles away, a local ethanol plant or an export market that requires barging grain down the Mississippi River. From New Orleans, this grain is then sent across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe or through the Panama Canal to China or Japan. Join us as we begin the journey down the Mighty Mississippi aboard the Show-Me State, a twin-screw barge pushing $5.4 million in grain.

With considerable talk taking place about the possibility of boosting average yields to 300 bushels of corn and 100 bushels of soybeans per acre by 2030, there are plenty of agronomic questions on how we can make this happen.