DULUTH - The Moroccan businessmen walked inside a corridor of the century-old grain elevator, tapping fists on concrete cinderblocks — like one might kick tires on a used car.
They wanted to know if the big old grain elevator, called Elevator A, with over 60 silos towering over the blue-black waters of Lake Superior, still had life.
"How do you ensure the silo is empty?" Youssef Mikou, general manager of Alf Sahel, a feed mill in Morocco, said.
"We will go right down into the bins," said Jeff Blaskowski, a Twin Ports facility manager for Hansen-Mueller, an Omaha-based grain buyer that owns the elevator.
The port's shipping lanes just endured the softest year for agricultural exports in well over a century. The May 30 visit by four leading grain buyers from Morocco to the Twin Ports of Duluth and Superior, Wis. — the name for the matrix of shipping and railyards at the western edge of Lake Superior — offered hope for renewed vitality.
In 2022, Duluth-Superior port authorities tallied a meager 644,000 tons of grain that terminals loaded onto boats, the lowest amount since Benjamin Harrison sat in the White House in 1889.
As a passenger cruise boat circled the harbor during the recent visit, local officials are keen to flex the working harbor's reputation once again.
For the Moroccans, a ship carrying feed from Duluth could cut five days off their current shipments from the U.S., which take a convoluted route by Panamax vessel from the Gulf of Mexico.