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Questions about grain haulers

Ultradog MN

Ultradog MN

Well-known Member
Location
Twin Cities
I've thought about this before but never asked here.
You see a lot of semis hauling grain to market. In the city here I see a lot of them at the big, big elevators.
Some of them are pretty fancy - big shiny Kenworths and Peterbilts. A lot of them pulling new grain trailers.
So there must be some money to be made in grain. $1.50 to $2 a mile?
My question is more about the value of the loads they're hauling.
How many bushels of grain will one of those trailers haul? I suppose it is measured by weight and not by volume? Maybe 20 or 22 ton in a load?
Do they test the moisture content at the elevator and pay accordingly? Or does the moisture have to be at a certain % before the elevator will take it? Does the load come from smaller, rural elevators or straight from the farm?
What is a typical load of corn or wheat worth?
ADM has a big elevator a few miles from me.
Always a lot of trucks there waiting to unload.
 
Not a get rich quick business. pretty much need to work every available day to make it all work. If you wanna invest in toys and shiney things, it gets even tuffer! new trailers are almost a must. they are built so light that after they get some use, it takes time and money to keep them road worthy. I trucked for 25yrs and made the least money during the 5years that i hauled.
 
Yep, from what I see and hear hauling grain is not a big money maker. For a big farmer it is a marketing tool that allows you to meet sudden deadlines where the elevator is offering above the current market price to fill an order.
 
In the prairie states, I think that most of the grain is moving to market via "unit trains" consisting of 100 grain cars. There are now loading facilities capable of loading 100 cars overnight. I would think that shipping costs by train would be much lower than hauling grain in trucks.
 
I think most of the haulers use them for own use and extra work to supplement cost, would think it is hard work to turn a buck.
 
Jerry, when I was working for the B.I.L during harvest his brother ran the combine, I ran the grain cart and he drove the semi to the elevator OR home farm depending on how wet the corn was. Most of the time I would dump 900 bushels into the semi trailer if going to elevator. If going to the farm it was a little more.
 
How many bushels of grain will one of those trailers haul? I suppose it is measured by weight and not by volume? Maybe 20 or 22 ton in a load?

(depends on the trailer and variables in the corn)

Do they test the moisture content at the elevator and pay accordingly?

(Yes, test weight and moisture is done at the elevator although many will know this before they take it in obviously)

Or does the moisture have to be at a certain % before the elevator will take it?

(I am sure they can reject any load for any reason. In 2014 I was taking some seriously moist corn into the elevator and took a seriously big discount...but they took it)

Does the load come from smaller, rural elevators or straight from the farm?

(My elevator loads out into larger trucks that go "someplace else" like the ethanol plant. Don't know if they sell to the larger elevators)

What is a typical load of corn or wheat worth?

(Depends on market, test weight, moisture, foreign matter.)

And that is all I can tell you as a small operator with just a couple years with grain experience under my belt. :)
 
Depends on length, size, and set up of the trailer. The bottom dump 2 compartment trailer that the local elevator sends to pick up my corn straight out of the field holds approximately 1500 bushels corn @ 20% moisture.
 
Well the load size depends on the axles. They load about 1500-2000 bushel in the gravel trains here. Yup the price makes the most difference in the value. It is tested for moisture and test weight. Oats are the biggest testweight screwing you can get. Nobody will figure it at the correct weight. They all figure them at about 36 pounds per bushel instead of the 32 that is the standard.
The regular hopper bottoms will legally haul about 850 bushels of beans. Corn a bit more.
We have a dump trailer that would hold close to 1500 if I filled it up. Not enough axles for that. Had over a 1000 in and lots of room for more.
At .40 for a load of 1800 bu to Toledo 100-120 miles it sounds fairly lucrative.
 
If the semi trucks are slightly older they might be owned by farms that do their own hauling in the off season. Some of the larger farms in central MN will haul to the river terminals.
 
(quoted from post at 05:01:52 04/05/16) I've thought about this before but never asked here.
You see a lot of semis hauling grain to market. In the city here I see a lot of them at the big, big elevators.
Some of them are pretty fancy - big shiny Kenworths and Peterbilts. A lot of them pulling new grain trailers.
So there must be some money to be made in grain. $1.50 to $2 a mile?
My question is more about the value of the loads they're hauling.
How many bushels of grain will one of those trailers haul? I suppose it is measured by weight and not by volume? Maybe 20 or 22 ton in a load?
Do they test the moisture content at the elevator and pay accordingly? Or does the moisture have to be at a certain % before the elevator will take it? Does the load come from smaller, rural elevators or straight from the farm?
What is a typical load of corn or wheat worth?
ADM has a big elevator a few miles from me.
Always a lot of trucks there waiting to unload.
Click to expand...

Truckers are limited by weight...and most cannot legally haul a full load of corn. A couple of years ago I helped my brother with corn, I ran the grain cart and loaded the semis. They wanted so much weight on the front and so much on the back. The grain cart with scale was pretty accurate. I think we normally loaded around 48000 lbs....a couple of times the trucker said the weigh stations were closed.... so filler up! I put on over 60,000 on those loads. The higher moisture loads went to the ethanol plant.
 
Most of those shiney trucks are old retired road trucks with new paint and some chrome to hide the defecys, so they are not that much money. Don't know too many making a living hauling grain and paying for a new truck.
 
Most of the farmers around here have their own semis. And they tear hell out of the gravel roads. They carry so much weight they push the crown out of the road and actually spread the shoulders out. It's almost impossible to repair the roads without completely regrading.

But--they're farmers. They destroy the gravel roads and then b**ch to the County Commissioners because the roads aren't maintained to their liking. One even had the guts to appear before us County Commissioners at a meeting and ask if we could pave the road between his farm and the elevator so he didn't have to get his truck dirty. They're also the first to complain about they're taxes being too high. Where do they think the money comes from to repair the roads?

I guess in their minds they consider themselves a privileged class because they're farmers.

My rant for the day.
 
There are a lot of variables in your question. Here in Michigan and Ontario we have a completely different set of rules for truck weights and if you have enough axles under a trailer you can haul nearly 2000 bushels of corn or beans. All you need to do is multiply that by the market price or the price that a farmer contracted his crop for to get the value of the load. A good dependable truck is a necessary evil on any farm that grows any amount of any commodity just like a combine, tractor, planter or any other piece of equipment. Most other states a person is limited to 80,000 pounds gross limit which most of the two hopper dump trailers are built for and that will limit a load of about 8 to 900 bushels depending how much the truck and trailer weighs. As far as flattening out the crown of the road, I have never seen that happen. The heaviest thing on any road that I have ever seen is a loaded grain cart where eight hundred to a thousand bushels where most all of the weight will be on two tires where if it were on a truck that weight would be spread out on 18 to 40 truck tires. When you own your own truck and deliver to what is known as a terminal elevator or an ethanol plant you eliminate the local elevator and the trucker and put their profit in your pocket.
 
Here a legal load of corn is going to be around 1,000 bushels. Current price of corn is approx $3.50. Here in SE Iowa it's generally less than 50 miles to an end point for corn. Lot of my dad's corn has a 20 mile trip to ADM in Cedar Rapids. Haven't asked in a while, but I'm guessing it's about 15 cents a bushel to haul it.
AaronSEIA
 
Sounds like you ought to move to town where your citiot mentality can be appreciated . Then you can cry about how your food isn't cheap enough and how evil farmers are because they are trying to make a living feeding your sorry a**
 
You are right goose. I am a full time farmer, and a town supervisor in a township with 8000 people. And I will tell you there are a lot of farmers who expect to be able to move very heavy equipment over roads built for model A fords.

To rebuild a paved road costs a minimum of $100,000 per mile, and if the roadbed needs more work, $150,000+ per mile. The township and the taxpayer cannot afford to re-do roads every few years.

There needs to be give and take on both sides. Yes communities need to invest more in roads. Our forefathers did. But we as farmers need to have common sense, too.
 
Pulled a hopper bottom for a couple of years in the mid 90s. IIRC, I'd load 26 tons of anything the "travel agent" lined up. Mostly grain from farms or smaller elevators to big elevators in Kansas City or Wichita. A lot of hauls out of KC were to the Springdale, AR area and consisted of feed ingredients like soy bean meal/hulls, corn gluten, blood meal, bone meal, and something called "cookie meal". It was ground and cooked cookies and cakes that came from bakers and distributers of things like twinkies. Smelled good, and was used to sweeten feed. Most of the products would not fill up the hoppers. One run I hated was from an Anhieser Bush rice processing plant in Jonesboro, AR to a Sedalia, MO dogfood plant. It was rice hulls, and was so light I could never get much on. Hauled rock salt from a mine in Hutchinson, KS to MODOT highway barns, sand from the Arkansas River near Tulsa to a KC plant that made landscape blocks, pelleted chicken poop from AR to western KS organic farms, fertilizer from the port of Catoosa to MFA COOPs all over MO. Once loaded popcorn from the combines in a field near Peculiar, MO delivered to a popcorn plant in Hamburg, IA. Grossed over 90,000. Oooops. Talk about a hard pull, the Pete was snortin. Wasn't overly fond of wheat or bean harvest time either. Hurry up and get loaded on the farm, make tracks to the elevator to get in line on Front street behind the other bazillion trucks waiting to get unloaded.
 

I owned and operated a triaxle dump for two years. I bought it in 2005 when construction was booming, and I was able to get paid top dollar running it. I sold it when the economy dropped off. Like so many other things when times are good you can make a buck. I have a friend that took delivery of a new Pete tractor last fall. He is on lease to a large paving company. I know what he makes because others have told me what that company pays. There is no money in it, but he drives a big shiny truck with all the goodies.
 
Goose is half right....I own a farm and I'm a retired farmer....I live on a main gravel road of 3 miles thats between 2 blacktops....The amount of farm semi traffic on this 3 miles is unreal as the guy down the road farms 10,000 acres....The road is constantly a mess and requires lots of maintenance...We have the township form of government and don't have nearly enough money to keep up with things..Our grader is often broke down for months at a time..I've had to blade the road myself several times..Yes,farm semis have the right to use the road but at what cost?
 
(quoted from post at 11:20:35 04/05/16) Most of the farmers around here have their own semis. And they tear hell out of the gravel roads. They carry so much weight they push the crown out of the road and actually spread the shoulders out. It's almost impossible to repair the roads without completely regrading.

But--they're farmers. They destroy the gravel roads and then b**ch to the County Commissioners because the roads aren't maintained to their liking. One even had the guts to appear before us County Commissioners at a meeting and ask if we could pave the road between his farm and the elevator so he didn't have to get his truck dirty. They're also the first to complain about they're taxes being too high. Where do they think the money comes from to repair the roads?

I guess in their minds they consider themselves a privileged class because they're farmers.

My rant for the day.
Click to expand...

Trucks can do a lot of damage to roads, even to interstate highways. But on the other hand trucks pay a lot of money to the states in the form or registrations, highway use taxes and of course fuel taxes. Here in NH a big chunk of that money goes back to the towns and cities in what they call TRA money to help with road maintenance. Now of course there are going to be situations where trucks do far more damage to a town's roads than the total that the towns or counties even get. When I had my truck I hauled sometimes out of a big quarry on a narrow back road where there were ruts six inches deep in the pavement. Not really fair to a small town, but perhaps the local state reps can get more money for the towns in that situation.
 
(quoted from post at 15:27:13 04/06/16)
(quoted from post at 11:20:35 04/05/16) Most of the farmers around here have their own semis. And they tear hell out of the gravel roads. They carry so much weight they push the crown out of the road and actually spread the shoulders out. It's almost impossible to repair the roads without completely regrading.

But--they're farmers. They destroy the gravel roads and then b**ch to the County Commissioners because the roads aren't maintained to their liking. One even had the guts to appear before us County Commissioners at a meeting and ask if we could pave the road between his farm and the elevator so he didn't have to get his truck dirty. They're also the first to complain about they're taxes being too high. Where do they think the money comes from to repair the roads?

I guess in their minds they consider themselves a privileged class because they're farmers.

My rant for the day.
Click to expand...

Trucks can do a lot of damage to roads, even to interstate highways. But on the other hand trucks pay a lot of money to the states in the form or registrations, highway use taxes and of course fuel taxes. Here in NH a big chunk of that money goes back to the towns and cities in what they call TRA money to help with road maintenance. Now of course there are going to be situations where trucks do far more damage to a town's roads than the total that the towns or counties even get. When I had my truck I hauled sometimes out of a big quarry on a narrow back road where there were ruts six inches deep in the pavement. Not really fair to a small town, but perhaps the local state reps can get more money for the towns in that situation.
Click to expand...

But farmed tagged trucks don't pay what the for hire trucks are paying. Plus most for hire trucks are not out on roads designed for lighter vehicles.

Rick
 
(quoted from post at 15:12:46 04/05/16) Sounds like you ought to move to town where your citiot mentality can be appreciated . Then you can cry about how your food isn't cheap enough and how evil farmers are because they are trying to make a living feeding your sorry a**
Click to expand...

And then the farmer should pay more in taxes if they do more damage to the roads, it's that simple. Why should a consumer have to help pay for crop insurance and the roads then be forced to buy products they don't want? To support a few arrogant farmers who thinks the world owes them a living, telling lies about how they (the US farmer) feeds the world? Want to make money farming? Stop treating it like it's a paid to you charity and start treating it like a business. If collectively farmers produce more corn than can be used then plant less corn. Don't expect me to have to buy gas with ethanol in it to keep corn prices up. If ethanol was so good everyone would be buying E85 and demanding that the car makers build cars that only burn ethanol. Many farmers are good people who use common sense and sound judgment on the roads. Then there is the arrogant ones who give the rest a bad name.

If a company produces too much they have to eat it and they may well wind up closing their doors.

We, the majority, don't farm. Farmers make up less than 1% of the American population. You have no more rights than anyone else. Stop acting like you do. Yes we have to have food. But you have to have things to. Electricity, fuel, oil, parts, clothing and many other things. You would yell if anyone one of those tore up your roads!

Please explain to the rest of us idiots just why one guy in 20 or so that uses a road has the "right" to damage that road and expect the rest who didn't damage it to pay for it? Most of us just have to pay our taxes. We don't get to write everything down to pay a minimum amount or none like many farmers do.

Rick
 
In my view farmers get away with too much when it comes to hauling heavy loads on county roads. Around here in our flatter country farmers pull two wagons that collectively haul more than a semi can legally haul. When they pull on the scale at the elevator they will weigh 110,000-120,000 pounds including the tractor. The weight of the grain is on four axles,with single wheels, equating to up to 15,000 pounds per axle. That is an overloaded axle on a truck with single wheels.

One day at the local elevator a farmer I know who has four of these huge wagons bragged to me about not having to pay for a license or heavy road use tax on his wagons. The next year the hitch pin broke when he was pulling two of those wagons down the road and both wagons ended on their sides in the ditch. He cleaned up the mess and pulled the bent up wagons home with no consequences from the law. If a truck loses the trailer the DOT would be right there with a ticket book in hand.

Our heavy clay soil profile gives good support for our gravel roads so we don't see much damage from heavy loads even in moderately wet weather. We do have trouble in the spring before the frost goes completely out but the truckers are pretty respectful and stay off if it is too soft. Feed trucks, rendering trucks and livestock haulers still use the roads when they are soft out of necessity and they do try to get most of the loads hauled at night or in the early morning while the roads are frozen.
 
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