Inland Water Freight Transportation (U.S.) — Industry Primer

NAICS 2022 code 483211. A general guide, for public-market and private investors alike, to the barge companies that move America's bulk cargo on its rivers and canals.

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1. Overview

Inland water freight transportation is the business of pushing barges up and down the United States' rivers and intracoastal canals — the Mississippi, Ohio, Illinois, Tennessee, Missouri and Arkansas river systems, plus the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. It is the quiet backbone of American bulk logistics: grain heading to export, refined fuel and petrochemicals, fertilizer, cement, steel, coal, salt and sand, moving in steel boxes lashed together and shoved by a diesel towboat.

Why it matters to an investor: it is a capital-intensive, cyclical, asset-heavy transportation business with high barriers to entry. Federal law (the Jones Act) walls off domestic waterway trade to U.S.-built, U.S.-crewed vessels, which limits new competition but makes the fleet expensive to build and slow to expand [19]. That slow supply response produces long profit cycles: when the barge fleet is tight, freight rates and margins climb sharply; when too much new steel hits the water, rates sag for years. The industry is also unusually exposed to the weather — a drought that drops the Mississippi a few feet can strand thousands of barges and spike rates [21].

Two ways in, and most of the industry is private. Public markets offer essentially one near-pure operating proxy, Kirby Corporation — the largest U.S. inland tank-barge operator [10][11] — plus indirect exposure through diversified names such as Archer-Daniels-Midland (which owns a large captive river fleet) and the energy partnership Genesis Energy [12][17]. Most of the industry, however, is privately held: the single largest operator (Ingram Marine Group) is family-owned, and several of the biggest fleets belong to private-equity firms, family businesses, or the grain and energy shippers themselves. For private-market investors, the action is in direct fleet ownership, private-equity control positions, vessel-secured private credit, and the terminal, fleeting and shipyard services that ring the rivers.

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2. What it is, and how it's structured

Scope. NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) code 483211 covers establishments primarily engaged in freight transportation of cargo on inland waters — rivers, lakes and intracoastal waterways — except the Great Lakes system. It includes barge towing service on inland waters and the chartering of crewed vessels for inland freight [2].

What it excludes (adjacent codes an investor should not confuse it with) [2]:

• 483111 / 483113 — Deep Sea, and Coastal & Great Lakes Freight Transportation: ocean-going ships and barging on the coasts and Great Lakes.
• 483212 — Inland Water Passenger Transportation: ferries and excursion boats, not cargo.
• 488310 / 488320 — Port and Harbor Operations, and Marine Cargo Handling: the docks and stevedoring, as standalone businesses.
• 488330 / 488390 — Navigational Services to Shipping, and Other Support Activities: harbor tugs that dock ocean ships, marine salvage and related services — support, not line-haul barging.
• 336611 — Ship Building and Repairing: the yards that build the vessels.

How the operation works. A "tow" is a diesel towboat (which pushes, despite the name) lashed to a raft of barges. A large 15-barge tow carries roughly the cargo of about 1,050 semi-trailer trucks, or 216 rail cars plus six locomotives [9]. Barges come in two broad families: dry-cargo hopper barges (grain, coal, aggregates, steel — open or covered) and liquid tank barges (petroleum, petrochemicals, asphalt). Ancillary businesses cluster around the line-haul trade: fleeting and harbor services (parking and re-sorting barges), terminals, stevedoring (loading/unloading), cleaning and repair.

Ownership mix. The industry is a barbell. At one end sit a handful of large integrated carriers running thousands of barges each; at the other, a long tail of small towboat and harbor-service outfits. Kirby describes roughly 25 large integrated companies in the inland tank-barge segment alone, alongside smaller and captive operators [10]. Ownership types include:

• Independent for-hire carriers (Kirby, Ingram, Marquette, Blessey, Canal Barge, Florida Marine).
• Private-equity-controlled fleets (American Commercial Barge Line, owned by affiliates of Platinum Equity) [13].
• Shipper-owned "captive" fleets — grain and energy companies that run their own barges in-house, e.g. Archer-Daniels-Midland's American River Transportation Company (ARTCO) and CGB Enterprises [17].

That last group matters for measuring the industry (see the undercount caveat below). The federal statistics do not provide a public-versus-private ownership split.

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3. How big it is

Federal business statistics for NAICS 483211 (our ground-truth figures). Note that they come from two different programs — the 2022 Economic Census (EC) and 2023 County Business Patterns (CBP) — so they are not a clean year-over-year series [1].

So this is a ~$7.6 billion-revenue industry run by fewer than 300 firms and under 18,000 direct employees [1]. The small headcount is not a mistake — barging is capital-intensive, not labor-intensive. A single crew of a handful of mariners can push cargo equivalent to a thousand trucks [9], so employment badly understates the industry's economic weight. (The SBA's 1,050-employee threshold is a procurement/eligibility line, not a measure of typical firm size [3].)

The undercount caveat — read this before you size the market. The 483211 figures capture only firms whose primary business is for-hire inland freight, and they miss real barging three ways:

1. Captive shipper fleets are classified elsewhere. When ADM, Cargill or a cement maker moves its own product on its own barges, that activity is typically booked under the parent's primary industry (grain merchandising, energy, manufacturing), not under 483211. ADM's ARTCO alone runs one of the largest covered-hopper fleets in North America [17]. A meaningful slice of real river tonnage therefore sits outside these numbers.
2. Nonemployers are excluded. CBP counts only employer establishments with paid staff; owner-operated barge or harbor businesses with no employees fall under separate Nonemployer Statistics, which are not in this dataset [4]. If tiny operators are material, the headline counts understate the full universe.
3. The receipts figure is a thin logistics margin on top of enormous cargo value. The ~$7.6 billion of receipts [1] is the freight bill, not the value of what moves. By the American Society of Civil Engineers' (ASCE) reckoning, roughly 465 million tons of goods worth over $158 billion travel the inland waterway system each year [5]; the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers put the "internal" portion of waterborne commerce at about 449 million short tons in 2023 [6]. Carriers earn a fraction of the dollars' worth of goods they carry.

For outside scale, a private market study of the broader North American barge market (a wider scope than 483211 — it spans Great Lakes and coastal) put that larger market near $5.6 billion in 2024 growing at mid-single digits [20]; the different scope and methodology are why our federal receipts figure is the better anchor for 483211 itself.

The physical network: about 12,000 miles of commercially active inland channels and tens of thousands of barges in the national fleet [5]. Our stats file contains no sector-wide fleet count, utilization rate, average freight rate, operating margin or ton-mile figure — those must come from company disclosures and waterway data, not be invented at the NAICS level.

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4. The investable universe

There are very few pure public plays. This is overwhelmingly a private-ownership industry.

Public companies

None is a pure 483211 investment. Kirby blends inland barging with coastal barging and an unrelated Distribution & Services business (engines, power generation): marine transportation is roughly $2.0 billion of revenue with inland about 81% of that segment in 2025, and D&S adds roughly $1.4 billion [10][11]. Genesis is a master limited partnership (MLP — you buy units, not shares, with partnership tax treatment), and barging is a minority of it [12].

Major private / strategic owners

A reminder on scope: the private market study cited above put its top five North-American carriers at only ~22% of that broader market [20] — lower than the 54.9% four-firm share (CR4) the Census reports for 483211 specifically [1]. Scope drives the number; treat the federal concentration data (Section 8) as authoritative for this industry.

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5. How the money works

Owners make money by keeping expensive steel utilized at good freight rates. The core levers:

• Barge utilization rate — the share of the fleet actively working (net of maintenance and delay days). This is the single most-watched number because it drives pricing power. When utilization runs in the low-to-mid 90% range, as it did for Kirby's inland fleet through 2025, operators can push rates up; when it sags, rates fall [10][11]. Utilization is barging's equivalent of a hotel's occupancy or an airline's load factor.
• Freight/day rates, split between two contract types:
• Term contracts (contracts of affreightment) — multi-month volume commitments, more stable, usually with fuel escalators that pass diesel-cost changes through to the shipper (Kirby notes a typical 30-to-120-day adjustment lag) [10].
• Spot market — voyage-by-voyage pricing that moves fast with supply, demand and weather, and generally without fuel clauses: more upside in tight markets, more pain in loose ones [10].
• Asset productivity — tow density, route balance (loaded vs. empty repositioning), turnaround time, crew availability and terminal access, expressed as revenue per ton-mile or per vessel-day. Kirby's inland revenue worked out to roughly 10.9 cents per ton-mile in mid-2025 [11].
• Operating margin. Well-run inland operators earn segment operating margins in the high-teens to low-20s percent in good markets [10][11].

Cost structure. The big buckets are fuel (largely passed through on term work, a real spot-market risk otherwise), crew wages, maintenance and drydocking (barges and towboats need periodic Coast Guard-inspected overhauls), plus depreciation, insurance and financing. New equipment is costly — a new inland tank barge runs into the low millions and a towboat far more — and because the Jones Act requires U.S.-built vessels, that cost is high and cannot be undercut by cheaper foreign steel [19].

The supply cycle is the whole game. Because new barges are expensive and slow to build, and old barges get scrapped when they wear out, fleet size adjusts sluggishly to demand. When shipyards over-build, a multi-year glut depresses rates; when building stalls and scrapping accelerates, the fleet tightens and rates recover. Reading where the industry sits in this build/scrap cycle matters more than any single quarter's cargo demand. Ancillary revenue from fleeting, terminals, stevedoring and cleaning adds a steadier, fee-based layer on top of the volatile line-haul business.

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6. What drives demand

Barge demand is derived demand — it rises and falls with the industries whose bulk cargo it carries:

• Agriculture / grain exports — the marquee driver. The inland system moves the corn and soybean crop from the farm belt to Gulf export terminals; the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) reports that roughly 60% of U.S. grain exports move down the Mississippi River system, and barges also carry a large share of incoming fertilizer [8]. Demand is seasonal (harvest peaks in autumn) and swings with crop size, global grain prices and trade policy (tariffs, export bans).
• Energy and petrochemicals. Refined products, crude, asphalt and petrochemicals from the Gulf Coast refining and chemical complex — the heart of the liquid tank-barge trade, since refineries and plants cluster on navigable water [10].
• Coal. Historically a huge dry-bulk cargo, but a structural decliner as coal-fired generation retires.
• Construction and industrial materials — sand, gravel, cement, salt, steel, scrap — tied to the construction and manufacturing cycle [6].
• Modal substitution and infrastructure policy. Water can relieve truck and rail congestion for heavy bulk, and federal Marine Highway grants and inland-port projects can expand waterborne freight — though landside connections ultimately determine whether new services succeed [23].

Because these end-markets are themselves cyclical, barge demand is pro-cyclical and commodity-sensitive. A strong harvest, a busy refining season or a construction boom tightens the fleet; a weak crop, a coal-plant closure or an industrial slowdown loosens it. Fleet replacement is a quieter tailwind: Kirby reports the inland tank-barge fleet stayed broadly flat from 2019 through 2025, so limited new construction can support pricing when demand holds [10].

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7. Regulation

Inland barging is one of the more heavily regulated corners of U.S. transportation:

• The Jones Act (Merchant Marine Act of 1920, 46 U.S.C. § 55102). Cargo moving between two U.S. points must travel on vessels that are U.S.-built, U.S.-owned, U.S.-flagged and U.S.-crewed (coastwise-endorsed by the Coast Guard) [19]. This is the industry's defining rule: it protects domestic operators from foreign-flag competition (a durable moat) but raises vessel-acquisition cost and constrains how fast capacity can grow.
• U.S. Coast Guard — Subchapter M (46 CFR). A towing-vessel safety and inspection regime fully phased in by July 2022. Operators must hold Certificates of Inspection and pass annual Coast Guard inspection, or run a Coast Guard-accepted Towing Safety Management System; annual per-vessel fees run about $973–$2,184, with industry-wide compliance costs estimated at $14–18 million a year [18]. Subchapter M raised the fixed cost of operating and modestly favors larger, well-capitalized fleets.
• Environmental rules. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates vessel discharges under the Vessel Incidental Discharge Act (VIDA); until the implementing Coast Guard rules are final and enforceable, existing Vessel General Permit requirements still apply [22]. EPA marine-diesel emissions standards and Coast Guard oil-spill and tank-barge rules add to the compliance load.
• U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). Not a rule-writer but the landlord and plumber of the system — it builds, operates and maintains the locks, dams and dredged channels barges depend on. Its funding decisions determine whether locks stay open (see Risks) [5][6].
• Inland Waterways Trust Fund. Construction and major rehabilitation of the lock-and-dam system are co-funded by a 29-cent-per-gallon diesel fuel tax paid by the barge operators themselves, with the trust fund covering a share of eligible construction cost (recently about 35% for many projects) — a user-fee model in which the industry partly pays for its own infrastructure [7].

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8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

The federal concentration data show a fragmented but consolidating industry [1]:

• The four largest firms take 54.9% of revenue (CR4); the top eight, 68.6%; the top 20, 83.0%; the top 50, 95.1%.
• The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) — the standard antitrust concentration measure — is 870.5, below the 1,000 level the U.S. Department of Justice's 2023 merger guidelines treat as "unconcentrated" [24].

So a handful of large players lead, but no one dominates, and a long tail of small operators fills out the fleet. One caveat: NAICS 483211 is a statistical category, not an antitrust market — real competition can be far tighter by commodity, waterway, vessel type or customer lane than the national HHI suggests [24]. The competitive pressure points:

• Consolidation is active. Scale helps absorb Subchapter M compliance, balance loaded and empty equipment, spread maintenance and dispatch cost, and win multi-year contracts. The clearest recent example: Redwood Holdings (Marquette's parent) agreeing to acquire Canal Barge in 2025, combining two large fleets [15]. Kirby has long been a serial acquirer of tank-barge fleets [10].
• Intermodal competition. Barges compete with rail (Class I railroads) and, over short hauls, trucks. Barges win decisively on fuel efficiency and cost for heavy, non-time-sensitive bulk — roughly 647 ton-miles per gallon versus ~477 for rail and ~145 for truck [9] — but lose on speed and on routes the rivers don't reach. Rail is the real competitive ceiling on barge rates for grain and coal.
• The Jones Act moat. By barring foreign vessels, the Act keeps competition domestic and entry expensive [19].

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9. Risks

• Weather and river levels — the defining operational risk. Drought forces lighter loads, shorter tows and one-way traffic, and can shut lanes entirely. In the historic 2022 low water, the Mississippi at Memphis fell to −10.79 feet (its lowest on record), roughly 2,000 barges backed up, and spot rates spiked as much as 400%; low-water episodes recurred in 2023 and 2025 [21]. Floods and winter ice cut the other way. This exposure is unusually direct and hard to hedge.
• Aging infrastructure and lock closures. ASCE reports that about 80% of the system's locks and dams have exceeded their 50-year design life, against a construction backlog near $7.5 billion [5]. An unplanned lock failure can bottleneck an entire river for weeks; funding is chronic and political.
• The supply/rate cycle. Over-building barges leads to multi-year rate depressions; the industry has repeatedly built into weakness. Getting the cycle wrong is the classic way to destroy capital here.
• Commodity and trade cyclicality. Weak harvests, grain-trade disputes and tariffs hit the grain trade; coal is in secular decline; an industrial slowdown softens dry bulk generally [8].
• Fuel costs and interest rates. Spot-exposed fuel (and the lag on fuel escalators) can compress margins; the capital intensity makes the business sensitive to financing costs [10].
• Safety and environmental liability. Spills, allisions (hitting fixed structures) and groundings carry cleanup, fines, insurance and reputational exposure, plus rising compliance cost [18][22].
• Labor. A persistent shortage of licensed mariners raises crew costs and can cap how much fleet an operator can crew.
• Transparency. Private operators disclose little, and the public names blend inland barging with unrelated businesses — so clean, comparable data is scarce.

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10. How to invest, and the outlook

Public routes (tickers and valuation belong here, not to the industry as a whole):

• Kirby Corporation (KEX) is the only large-cap near-pure play — but even Kirby blends inland barging, coastal barging and an unrelated engine/power-generation distribution business [10][11]. Investors watch its inland utilization and spot-rate commentary as the cleanest read on the whole industry's health.
• Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM) offers integrated, indirect exposure through ARTCO inside a much larger agricultural supply chain [17]; Genesis Energy (GEL) offers minority exposure through an MLP wrapped in a diversified midstream business [12].
• There is no U.S.-listed pure inland-barge ETF; broad transportation and industrial funds give only trace exposure. Public-company analysis should focus on normalized cash generation, utilization, contract coverage, fleet age, capital spending, leverage, and the share of earnings actually tied to inland freight.

Private routes — where most of the industry actually lives:

• Direct fleet ownership / operating companies — buying or building towboats and barges and contracting them out. Diligence turns on vessel condition, replacement needs, customer and contract concentration, fuel clauses, crew cost, terminal access, environmental history and waterway-disruption exposure.
• Private-equity control positions — the ACBL/Platinum Equity model of owning a large fleet outright [13].
• Family-business succession and roll-ups — the Marquette–Canal Barge combination shows the consolidation opportunity [15].
• Terminals, fleeting and harbor services, and vessel-secured private credit — the steadier, fee-based infrastructure alongside the volatile line-haul trade.

Near-term setup. Coming out of 2025, the picture was constructive: inland utilization ran in the low-to-mid 90s and rates firmed, because years of restrained new-barge building tightened the fleet — a favorable point in the supply cycle [10][11]. Kirby's own 2026 guidance called for low-to-mid-single-digit inland revenue growth, low-90s utilization, improving pricing and lower maintenance needs [11] — company guidance, not an industry forecast. Whether the strength holds depends on a familiar checklist: how much new construction the better rates coax back into the water; the size and timing of the grain harvest and export demand; refining and petrochemical activity on the Gulf; and, above all, the weather. Longer term, three structural forces bear watching: the slow decline of coal cargo, the gradual (federally funded) modernization of aging locks and dams, and continued consolidation into fewer, larger, better-capitalized operators.

Bottom line. Inland water freight is a small-headcount, capital-heavy, moat-protected transport industry that punches far above its ~$7.6 billion of reported receipts [1] because it carries roughly $158 billion of goods a year [5]. Public investors have essentially one good handle on it; private investors have the whole river. Either way, the returns are governed less by any single year's cargo than by two slow variables: where the fleet sits in its build/scrap cycle, and what the water does.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census and 2023 County Business Patterns, NAICS 483211 — Inland Water Freight Transportation (receipts, firms, establishments, employment, annual and Q1 payroll, concentration ratios CR4/CR8/CR20/CR50, HHI). https://data.census.gov/ (EC2200SIZECONCEN, EC2248BASIC, 2023 CBP)
2. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 NAICS Definitions — 483211 and adjacent codes (483111, 483113, 483212, 488310, 488320, 488330, 488390, 336611), 2022. https://www.census.gov/naics/
3. U.S. Small Business Administration, Table of Small Business Size Standards (NAICS 483211 = 1,050 employees), 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
4. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns and Nonemployer Statistics program overviews (employer vs. nonemployer coverage). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html; https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/nonemployer-statistics.html
5. American Society of Civil Engineers, 2025 Infrastructure Report Card — Inland Waterways (≈12,000 network miles, ≈465M tons / >$158B, ~80% of locks past 50-year life, ~$7.5B backlog), 2025. https://infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/inland-waterways-infrastructure/
6. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Waterborne Commerce Statistics Center (internal U.S. tonnage ≈449 million short tons, 2023). https://www.iwr.usace.army.mil/About/Technical-Centers/WCSC-Waterborne-Commerce-Statistics-Center/
7. Congressional Research Service, Inland Waterways Trust Fund (29-cents-per-gallon diesel tax; construction cost-share), 2024. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF10020
8. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Marketing Service, Importance of Inland Waterways to U.S. Agriculture / Grain Transportation Report (~60% of U.S. grain exports via the Mississippi system; fertilizer). https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/transportation-analysis/inland-waterways-report
9. Texas A&M Transportation Institute / Waterways Council, A Modal Comparison of Domestic Freight Transportation (647 ton-miles per gallon; 15-barge-tow equivalency), 2017. https://waterwayscouncil.org/
10. Kirby Corporation, 2025 Form 10-K (inland fleet ~1,100 tank barges / 266 towboats; ~25 large integrated carriers; fuel-escalator 30–120 day lag; segment structure; fleet stability 2019–2025), 2026. https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0000056047
11. Kirby Corporation, 2025 Fourth-Quarter and Full-Year Results & 2026 outlook (revenue ~$3.4B, net earnings ~$354.6M, EPS ~$6.33, marine ~$2.0B with inland ~81%, ~10.9 cents/ton-mile, low-to-mid-90s utilization), 2026. https://investors.kirbycorp.com/
12. Genesis Energy, L.P., Marine Transportation segment disclosures (inland ~33 boats / ~82 barges plus offshore fleet). https://www.genesisenergy.com/operations/marine-transportation
13. American Commercial Barge Line / Platinum Equity, company profile and 2020 recapitalization (~3,550 barges, ~190 towboats; PE ownership; 2020 Chapter 11). https://www.acbl.net/
14. Ingram Marine Group / Ingram Industries, company profile (largest overall inland barge operator; privately held). https://ingrambarge.com/who-we-are/our-story/
15. The Waterways Journal, Redwood Holdings (Marquette Transportation) to Acquire Canal Barge Company, 2025. https://www.waterwaysjournal.net/2025/06/24/redwood-holdings-owner-of-marquette-transportation-announces-acquisition-of-canal-barge-company/
16. Canal Barge Company, company profile (900+ tank/hopper/deck barges; ~49 towboats). https://www.canalbarge.com/
17. Archer-Daniels-Midland, ARTCO Barge and Stevedoring (captive covered-hopper and tank fleet; line-haul boats; fleeting; stevedoring; repair). https://www.adm.com/en-us/products-services/services/transportation-logistics/barge-stevedoring/
18. U.S. Coast Guard / Federal Register, Inspection of Towing Vessels (Subchapter M) and User Fees for Inspected Towing Vessels (July 2022 phase-in; $973–$2,184 fees; $14–18M annual industry cost). https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/12/28/2023-28112/user-fees-for-inspected-towing-vessels; https://www.dco.uscg.mil/tvncoe/
19. Congressional Research Service / U.S. Maritime Administration, Shipping Under the Jones Act (46 U.S.C. § 55102; U.S.-built/owned/flagged/crewed requirement). https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45725; https://www.maritime.dot.gov/ports/domestic-shipping/domestic-shipping
20. GMInsights, North America Barge Transportation Market (~$5.56B in 2024; top-5 share ~22% of that broader market), 2024. https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/north-america-barge-transportation-market
21. NASA Earth Observatory / AccuWeather, Mississippi River drought and barge disruptions (Memphis −10.79 ft, Oct 2022; ~2,000 barges backed up; ~400% rate spike; 2023 and 2025 recurrences), 2022–2025. https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/drought-and-barge-backups-on-the-mississippi-150504/
22. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Vessel Incidental Discharge Act (VIDA). https://www.epa.gov/vessels-marinas-and-ports/vessel-incidental-discharge-act-vida
23. U.S. Department of Transportation, United States Marine Highway Program (USMHP). https://www.transportation.gov/rural/grant-toolkit/united-states-marine-highway-program-usmhp
24. U.S. Department of Justice, Herfindahl-Hirschman Index / 2023 Merger Guidelines (unconcentrated below HHI 1,000; NAICS categories are not antitrust markets), 2023. https://www.justice.gov/atr/herfindahl-hirschman-index
25. Company profiles — Florida Marine Transporters (https://www.floridamarine.com/), Magnolia Marine Transport / Ergon (https://www.magnoliamarine.com/), CGB Enterprises / CGB Marine (https://cgb.com/cgb-marine/).

Note on markers: Ingram Marine Group is widely identified as the largest overall inland barge operator across industry trade sources; it is privately held and publishes no fleet count. Fleet figures for other privately held operators are not consistently disclosed and are cited from company materials where available.