The St. Louis barge rate outranks Mississippi grain barges by 77 percentile points
The St. Louis barge rate sat at the 97.3th percentile of its own history in the week to 26 September, against the 20.5th percentile for Mississippi grain barges, the 91.5th percentile of 106 gaps recorded since 2024.
- Reading
- 76.82 percentile points
- Observed
- 26 Sept 2026
- Percentile
- 92nd percentile
What it means
The quote is the price of moving grain south and the count of loaded grain barges through Locks 27 at Granite City is the quantity that moved, on the same river in the same week. A harvest that bids for barges lifts both at once, so they normally rise and fall together. Freight has repriced while no more grain is moving, so barges have left the river rather than more cargo arriving on it.
How it was measured
USDA Agricultural Marketing Service barge freight and Army Corps of Engineers lockage counts. Both legs print weekly and are reduced to the week that contains their print, each taking that leg's own reading. Each leg is then ranked against its own history year on year, because both peak with the harvest and a rank of either level would rank the calendar. Ranked over 106 shared weeks, 26 September 2026.
Series: St. Louis barge rate