California produce season

There are still a lot of us out that originally got into this because we actually liked it... Not because the mill in town closed and we had no other options. Its just that the ATA and the megas have made it so hard for us to compete, comply and remain profitable.
I started in 1978 and it was a totally different ball game then. I remember phones at the tables at truck stop restaurants, load board monitors, pay phones, road atlases. No cell phones, GPS's, elogs. If you had bigger than a 350 you were lucky and if you had a Cat you were king of the road. And most company trucks were cabovers.

 

I tried to load Friday but they said the product would not be ready. They did say if I got there early Monday they might load me earlier.

 

Wasn't posting this for the pricing. The data shows the approx number of loads out of various areas and you can see the shift in the produce seasons from mid to upper valley and the desert SW.

 

Yeah they have no idea how many loads there are. TQL posts every load they have at least six different ways ffs. Every single load list customer generates 5-10 posts per load they actually have because they broadcast what they have to at least 5-10 different brokers, who all post it up. This is a real pet peeve of mine as it gives people bad information about how much freight is in the market, which causes them to make bad decisions that aren't great for them OR me.

EDIT: I on the other hand do the opposite by posting a load I have 10 of once. My point is that it's very hard to tell how much freight there is using anything but the price the market is offering. If the price is high there are a lot of loads. If the price is low there aren't. It's usually as simple as that.

 

How's your trip going Rich?

 

Nogales has been running since December. Same with Yuma AZ and McAllen TX

 

Load boards are far from accurate. They are bottom of the barrel rates. Also the USDA truck report is pretty accurate.... Been hauling veggies for over 15 years.

 

Yeah I'm sure all my customers are getting their orders filled for 30-50% lower than the market rate. That sounds like real life...

EDIT: You might have some kind of weird old school contract that pays you like this. I know some of the truckers my customers deal with get paid a round trip rate. Not many of them, but a few. If that's what you have it's not apples to apples and you know it.

 

My neighbors friend does reefer between Washington State & Texas for quite a few years now using the same broker.
IIrc, he said he ran approx. 120K miles last year and grossed a litle over 200K, about $1.80/mile for all miles.

He's been doing this a while now, so he has regular contacts in each state.

He got a ticket in CA about 2 yrs ago for reefer not being CARB compliant, so he has not been back.

 

???
Crops don't work that way, flooding out the field kills most crops as easily as drought does. Produce is down because they started restricting water, which means a lot of areas didn't even bother to seed...