I’ve said it before: semi-trucks and trailers are a necessary evil in agriculture. Maintenance is expensive. Fuel isn’t cheap. And finding qualified part-time help to drive these big rigs can be tough. That last bit is why we started contemplating some updates to our grain hauling fleet.
The trucks we run are 2007 and older, which means they were manufactured before the mandatory use of Diesel Exhaust Fluid systems, or pre-DEF. We basically run three trucks and have an even older ‘potato chip truck’ (low horsepower) as a spare. All are good trucks but are getting some age to them.
- One truck in particular had a rough life before it came to us. It still drives well, but it isn’t a thing of comfort.
- Transmission and other work on a second truck brought us a $10,000 bill after harvest.
- The laundry list is growing for items to check on the third truck.
These are still good and reliable trucks, and a refresh wouldn’t be out of the picture. But we need automated transmissions. Here’s why.
Manual transmissions limit labor pool
For many years we hired retired truckers to drive for us. Other than the fall, it is a part-time job, and we allow them to tell us how many and which hours they want to work. We don’t have work for them all the time either, so there is some give and take. Unfortunately, both of our drivers had periods of time this year when they were unable to work due to injury or surgery.
We were fortunate this fall to find another driver, but the pool of candidates is small when you’re driving older manual shift trucks.
Ideally, I would like a pair of identical newer trucks with automated transmissions for two reasons:
- Most days we only have two trucks on the road, so two new-to-us semis would eliminate squabbles over who drives which truck.
- An automated transmission would give us access to a larger pool of candidates should we need another driver. It also would be easier for my kids to learn how to drive a truck—should any choose to).
The search hasn’t been easy. We’ve spoken with the truck shops that do most of our repairs and filter available models based on their input. A lot of trucks we found are out of our budget. We’ve also seen a lot of trucks with higher miles than we would prefer. We checked into several that just didn’t feel right. We found some that were just too far away to make sense. On some of them, we were a few dollars short on our bid.
I’m optimistic. Eventually, we will find the right truck(s).