Dwight Robinson, vice president of Los Angeles Harbor Grain Terminal Inc., clearly takes to heart his view that “stagnation” is not a good word.
Dwight Robinson, VP of Los Angeles Harbor Grain Terminal
Leading a venerable Southern California enterprise through diversification and commodity containerization, as a pro-business candidate for local city council, teaching his children’s Sunday school class and still finding time to enjoy his passion for sports, Robinson is quite the multitasker, as he shares in an exclusive interview with the American Journal of Transportation. Transloading into ocean containers has revolutionized how grains and related products are shipped, compared to when the company now known as Los Angeles Harbor Grain Terminal was founded in 1958. Can you tell us about the efficiencies of LA Grain’s present operation?Back in ’58, containers didn’t really exist, so we were a bulk-loading operation, loading bulk grains and byproducts, and we did that for most of the ’60s and a good portion of the ’70s, as the bulk market in Southern California started to deteriorate and a lot of the products started heading to the Pacific Northwest plus continued to move through the Gulf. We decided to make a shift in our operation in the early ’80s and focused specifically on containers. We moved from a location right next to the water to a location about 2 miles inland now, giving us ability to spread out a little and focus on containers. How that made us more efficient and how we continue to be more efficient is through looking for ways to load as many containers simultaneously as possible, looking at different types of conveyor systems so we can handle a wide variety of products, adding conveyor belts and different types of screw augers… Efficiency also comes with training. We’ve been very blessed to have a good labor force here. Our longest-serving employee, aside from Howard himself [Howard L. Wallace Jr., company president, son of the co-founder and father-in-law of Robinson], who’s been here since 1970, is our scalemaster, Roy Mills, who’s been here since about 1973 and whose father and uncle were with the company. A lot of our employees are second or third generation with the company and/or have siblings who also work here. That poses some challenges from time to time, but the benefits far outweigh the challenges. So what exactly do you now ship, and are you using the Port of Long Beach, the Port of Los Angeles or both?Both. We’re located in the Port of Los Angeles, but about 2 feet out the window is the fence line to the Port of Long Beach. We handle corn, soybeans, wheat, a lot of hay, beet pulp pellets, iron ore, wastepaper and petroleum byproducts. The vast majority heads to the Asian continent, and a fair amount of the hay is starting to head into the Middle East… One of the things that’s really helped us survive over 54 years is having a very diversified portfolio of products we’ll handle, and also different countries that we work with, and a nice variety of customers as well, from small brokers selling some containers of wheat out of their basement, to midsize grain-trading companies, to big agribusinesses like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland. Diversification has really allowed us to weather the storm, the ups and downs of things like the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, even the global recession in 2008. What further changes are taking place in the way such products are exported? Over the next 10 to 20 years, we can expect to see a focus on containerization of more and more export products, whether agricultural or some sort of energy products. I really see that as a continuing trend. Especially when it comes to agriculture products, you have an emerging middle class all throughout Asia. There’s a desire for smaller quantities of product rather than 50,000-ton ships. I think the containerization of gr