Cole Russell Post # 1

I am interning at RMG with Stuart Strunk. Stuart is an operations manager at RMG. The reason I chose to intern at RMG is because it was founded by my great grandfather John Russell in 1965. The first day we spent mainly in the office learning about RMG’s services & the background of the company. The company started out as mainly a freight forwarding company. Freight forwarders handle the paperwork & logistics of getting a product from a manufacturer to an end buyer / customer. In the early days, most of RMG’s clients were in Europe. Today RMG handles shipments of grain all over the world. They have also grown so much & now handle many different services such as supervision, inspection, analysis, etc.. Most of the shipments exported are for animal feed. Some of the types of grain are corn, rice, wheat, sorghum, soybeans, and by-products made from corn & soybeans such as soybean meal, soy hull pellets, corn gluten meal, corn gluten feed pellets, and dried distillers grain meal aka DDGS. Big grain manufacturers such as  ADM, Bunge, Gavilon, LDC,  will hire RMG to attend the loading of vessel, sample the cargo, analyze the cargo, and handle all the export documentation. RMG will start by locating the barges of cargo being sold & track these barges until they make it down river to load onto the vessel. There will be a contract between the manufacture & the buyer. The manufacturer will hire RMG & sometimes the end buyer will as well for extra services that may not be stated in the contract such as extra analysis or extra documentation. The huge advantage RMG is the river system. The river system allows U.S. grain and grain by-products originating in the Midwest move economically in large quantities. The River System provides a continuous flow of product by water from roughly half of the 50 states. I was very surprised to see how much more cargo you can move via barges / vessel vs trucks or rail cars. The below pictures will give you an idea of how it works.