Need insight on rental trucks for farm use

Have not had time to look into it. Renting Ryder, Penski, U-Haul etc for farm use like 1-2 months. One big out fit does it on road tractors but another outfit I am associated with is looking at it. Reasons are cost of maintaining a truck year round. Has any of you done it. For what its worth, anytime I tried renting something like that I got 10 pounds of crap in a 5 pound bag!!!! Thanks for the opinions.

If you are talking about straight trucks, most rental trucks are not made for heavy duty use. Knew a guy who bought a used U-Haul truck and converted it to a grain truck. It was geared for light loads (furniture) on pavement. That U-haul couldn't haul a load of grain out of a soft field.

Tend to agree with you on the light duty part. The furniture movers we always called "bed bug haulers"

May be different in other parts of the country, but around here, I know of no rental trucks that would be useful for a farmer, other than a road tractor.

I looked into renting a Semi tractor from Penski several years ago. It was around $4K a month plus a whole boat load of restrictions and possible "extra" charges. I think your going to find that renting one will be more costly than the maintenance is going to be. I have never been able to justify renting any type of larger equipment other than daily stuff like excavators and such.

We rent trucks, tractors, and hire crews for harvest. It may be different with grapes but the cost of a set of doubles and a semi tractor that really would not be used any other time of the year makes sense. Remember, the rental cost can be written off more fully than other costs. There are many tractor sale places that will rent here in Northern CA. We do have our own bins that we pick into. Those are hard to come by. Custom picking by crew or harvester is an option. Many of the machine pickers are too costly to have sitting around all year.

The same goes for my cattle. It is better to hire out the haul than to maintain a truck and trailer, especially when I add in my time driving. Even sending a few head to the yard, there are plenty of guys that will haul. Again, it can be written off.

If you feel a need to own equipment, consider starting a paper company that handles the equipment and rents it to your farm business. When you do work for others it makes things clearer on paper and allows for a ton of write offs on both sides. This is one of the reason all the big cattle companies are land and cattle. Each part of the business has its specialty and benefits.

We have dozers for road work that get used a couple of times a year. I pushed the numbers and it definitely pays to rent or hire out. If had sold the dozers years ago, that money would have covered road maintenance for 10 years. Now CA is set to declare nearly every diesel piece of equipment illegal due to new environmental laws. It is anybody's guess when your new tractor will no longer be deemed clean.