Buying a used truck for regional work

Those horse people are finicky about the hay and want to sort through the stack
Used to sell a lot of hay to dairy farmers along the snake river and the profitable ones usually paid promptly
They like the first third and fourth cutting

 

I have loaded a lots of hay, flats, double drops, live bottoms vans, reefers, and lots of pots. We did in later years have a farm hand, I called it the grim reaper, that would grab 18 bales at a time off of a stack put up with a stack wagon. This eliminates some labor on any open deck and the live bottoms, but on a van you still have to load from the back and try to push the load forward, PLUS you have to load the top 2 layers by hand anyway, better to just start out with a conveyor running and stacking by hand.

The very reason that there is only a very small percentage of hay baled in little bales anymore.

 

Here's something to think about.

Call your insurance company and find out what the cost of insurance with a million-dollar liability will be for your operation with authority. Then ask them if you had insurance only to haul your own Goods, not for hire, meaning you don't need your Authority or a million-dollar liability what that would be.

I am in a different part of the country, but the insurance with a million dollars liability with my own authority is around 11,000, but if I was strictly hauling my own Goods not for hire it would be around 3,500 for 500,000 liability.

I could be wrong but I thought that if you are actually a farm that there is a special rate that is only for farms/ agricultural.

 

Down here they run hay on doubles and it helps to have a squeezer which you might already have. Maybe there's a hay hauler around that would let you lease on n exchange for providing relief when it gets busy; hay folks I've met tend to cooperate to get things done.