Since July, The DeLong Company rents the Grain Export Center at the Port of Oswego Authority
By Matthew Liptak
The DeLong Company saw an opening in July to lease the Port of Oswego’s three-year-old Grain Export Center and the 100-plus year family-owned agricultural company hasn’t looked back.
Headquartered at the small community of Clinton, Wisconsin, DeLong’s acquisition of the lease allows it to move and store massive amounts of grain Upstate and from the Midwest and then send it to coastal ports, where it heads to buyers around the globe.
In 1913, Wisconsin brothers William and Jesse DeLong, along with John Johnson and his son, Frank, bought a single grain elevator in Darien, Wisconsin. The company has grown to own 39 facilities and offices in New York, Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, New Jersey and Ohio.
It operates six divisions: agronomy, seed, grain, exports, transport and wholesale. In 2023, it even expanded to include offering crop insurance to farmers.
According to the company website, the Journal of Commerce ranked The DeLong Company as the No. 1 exporter of containerized agricultural products. It also reports DeLong is fourth from the top in rankings of all United States companies for total U.S. container exports in 2025.
“We wanted to improve market opportunities for customers in the region, and so leasing was part of a larger strategy to expand and invest to have customers have more outlets for their grain,” said The Delong Company’s spokeswoman Erin Hamburg.
The leased Grain Export Center in Oswego offers both ship-loading capability as well as rail access for moving the grain for shipping to foreign ports. The Port of Oswego also has a USDA laboratory onsite, which gives ready opportunities to meet government compliance regulations.
DeLong has a robust network of facilities that allows grain from American farmers to be transferred to railroad container cars, which are then sent to ports that move the grain to the large container ships, which can move the product worldwide.
The Oswego facility is notable for DeLong, because it also allows the agriculture company to transfer grain from ships on the Great Lakes that carry huge loads of grain in loose bulk form in their holds.
“DeLong’s international market in general has a lot of customers in Southeast Asia, but now, through the Great Lakes system, we’ve really entered the European market as well,” Hamburg said. “Our ability at all these different sites allows us to reach customers all around the world.”
The company’s East Coast regional manager, Gibson Retamoza, oversees grain shipping in Newark, New Jersey.
“That site [Oswego] has been very important to us,” he said. “With its rail loading it’s been a very good addition. They’ll ship out loaded rail cars from the Oswego facility and send it to my site. We’ll ship them out. I think it’s like 48 different countries currently.”
He said the grain is often used for oils or animal feed.
For him, Retamoza said, working in the industry is an easy fit.
“I grew up in it,” he said. “I grew up in western Kansas. It was just corn stalks and wheat fields as far as the eye could see. My dad was a truck driver. He would pick up corn at the inbound (grain) elevators. I’d ride with him. I remember my childhood hero was the elevator superintendent. He would give me candy whenever I stopped by and it kind of stuck with me. Simply put I’m living the dream.”
Although The DeLong Company might fall into the category of what some people call “Big Ag” — big agriculture — the company, like many surviving American farming, or farm-oriented operations, has simply grown over the space of many decades. At its root, the business is based on relationships and some of those seem almost timeless.
“I’ve directly worked with people here whose grandparents did business with my grandparents through this business,” Hamburg said. “There’s longevity there.”
And some at DeLong, like Retamoza, continue to find this business sector, that relies on the harvest and changing seasons of the land, to be a field of dreams.
“I know that every single container is going to (help) feed somebody,” he said. “I never knew how passionate a (position) it could be.”
With the Port of Oswego’s new relationship with the growing shipper, the horizons look promising.
Two business success stories based in rural regions of Wisconsin and New York working together seem a logical fit. Between the age-old expertise of The DeLong Company and the impressive capability of Oswego’s modern Grain Export Center, there’s cause to think the partnership will reap profitable harvests well into the future.
