American farmers compete in a fast-moving, price-sensitive global marketplace, and the nation’s inland waterways—rivers, canals, locks, and related infrastructure—are a strategic asset that helps keep U.S. agricultural exports competitive. In support of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the U.S. DOT Volpe Center led a study in partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to quantify how the inland waterway network supports jobs, incomes, and GDP and evaluates the economic case for targeted lock and capacity investments in line with DOT Order 2100.7.

The U.S. DOT Volpe Center updated a 2019 analysis to include more states, commodities, and waterways. The team led strategic stakeholder outreach to understand how shippers, operators, and communities use and depend on the inland network. The team applied planning and economic analysis, freight modeling, and data-driven tools—including economic impact software and the U.S. DOT Volpe Center’s own Freight Transportation Optimization Tool (FTOT)—to estimate baseline contributions and to model scenarios such as lock expansions and disruptions to capacity.

The team found that exports moved via inland waterways of five major agricultural commodities support an estimated 123,185 jobs, $8.27 billion in labor income, and $17.62 billion in GDP annually. These estimates are broken out by soybean, corn, wheat, rice, and sorghum grain exports in the main report.

Expanding lock capacity as referenced in the U.S. Army Corps’ Capital Investment Strategy could create roughly 8,199 additional jobs and generate more than $1.0 billion in GDP each year. The analysis also highlighted transportation cost advantages: moving a typical shipment from Scott County, IA, to New Orleans by rail would cost about $60,000 more than using inland waterways; a comparable route from Whitman County, WA, to Portland would cost about $20,000 more by rail.

USDA published this report in January 2026. The U.S. DOT Volpe Center team’s results offer actionable evidence for policymakers weighing cost-effective infrastructure investments that sustain U.S. agricultural competitiveness and strengthen the nation’s economic position in global markets.

About the U.S. DOT Volpe Center

Since 1970, the U.S. DOT Volpe Center has advanced transportation innovation for the public good, providing multimodal applied research, collaborating with federal, state, and industry partners, and multidisciplinary technical leadership and expertise to solve complex transportation challenges. Learn more at www.volpe.dot.gov.