Trainload shipments of grain by elevators substantially reduce their transportation costs. However, many elevators must make investments upgrading their plant before they can ship in trainload movements. In this article, a logit model is developed which considers the investment decision for...

ABSTRACT Changes in grain handling technologies and favorable terms on rail services are encouraging construction of state of the art grain handling facilities. Given these are high fixed and low marginal cost operations that are becoming increasingly vertically interdependent, the investments...

The grain shipping industry is highly competitive and has become technically advanced during the past decade. These changes, along with the introduction of innovative shipping mechanisms, have made logistics management an important source of opportunity and risk for grain shippers. A stochastic...

The Russian grain marketing system is going through a remarkably traumatic evolutionary change, the dimensions of which are potentially unprecedented in the world grain industry. A highly centralized command system, absent of any concept of a market, has been the mechanism for allocating...

European Union (EU) traceability requirements impose added costs and risks on suppliers. A stochastic simulation model is developed to determine optimal testing strategies and marginal costs to conform to EU traceability requirements for exports of non-genetically modified (non-GM) wheat from...