Anyone else catch this release

@06driver I don’t think it’s fair for you to complain about one industry getting the breaks they do when your employer gets tax breaks everywhere it builds a store or a DC. Whether you like it or not, money makes the world go around no matter what the business or industry is.

All this argument does is continually show the ignorance people have for an side of the industry they’re not involved in. Maybe when the megas get into livestock we will all be better off. They will be running team so they can obey the same rules as everyone else. And the guy driving just got out of school 6 months ago so he’s qualified to train the guy riding with him. By golly they’ll be following all the same rules and the world will be a better place because inexperienced mega drivers working for slave wages never wreck. But hey, they’ll be following the same rules.

 

And yet you're here defending the serious government overreach that is the whole hos bs to begin with. You still haven't dealt with how much of your paycheck comes directly from the government through food stamps either, you don't like any government subsidies, and that's fine I entirely agree with you, but that's what that is.

 

If your gonna lie make it believable.

You don't know the head from the tail that's obvious.

 

I’ve pretty much admitted how I ran when it was busy so I’m not trying to hide anything.

Produce has been an exempt Ag product since way back in the ICC days before deregulation. So good luck to you getting that changed.

And a tax break is the same as a subsidy. When Wal-Mart gets a $9600 tax credit for every veteran they hire that’s similar to a subsidy in my eyes. When they openly admit to “controlling” 18% of the SNAP market that sure seems like quite a bit of government money flowing their way. When each Supercenter can cost the taxpayers upwards of a million dollars betweens the tax breaks and the employees public assistance that’s similar to subsidizing them in my eyes.

But let’s get back to the topic at hand. Without a basic understanding of how and when livestock moves from different parts of the country then it’s hard to take anyone serious. If you owned your truck would you pay someone to sit in the passenger seat just in case you needed them? I wouldn’t and I didn’t. The miles that most guys run are nothing out of the ordinary for the year, only difference is I usually got to lay around for a few months at home.

Rest pens, well I’ve given my opinion on those also. They would have to be cleaned after each load was rested to avoid any biosecurity risks. That urine and feces has to go somewhere, usually to the city water treatment plant after they’ve filtered out what they can at the facility. The last time I looked into it an EPA compliant trailer washout was upwards of $2mil to get off the ground, and that’s for two trailer wash bays. So I could imagine that compliant rest pens would cost more than that just due to the amount of waste water you’d have.

So you go find a chunk of land somewhere around Jackson MS and build your EPA compliant pens. Then try and make your money back when they’re only used 3 months out of the year. And that would only cover the calves going towards OK out of FL. Better build you another set of pens down along 10 for the calves that are staying south. Then go out west and build some along 10 and 40 and 80 for the calves coming out of CA for 2-3 months a years. Then build a set somewhere around Douglas WY for the calves coming out of MT in the fall. It’s only money right?

You wouldn’t really need rest pens in the Midwest because many guys are finding the calves moving south out of the Dakotas can be logged legal using the existing MAP21 150 mile exemption.

Why the biosecurity risk if they’re just going to feedlot? Well that would require you to have a basic understanding of feedlots. Calves don’t get mixed. Most ranchers retain ownership until the calves are up to slaughter weight and that’s when they’re sold. So the herds don’t get mixed together at the feedlot, they’re kept separate, often times with differing feed rations based on what the goal weight is and how fast they want to get there.

So let’s put our business hats on for a second. Would you as the owners of the calves want them dumped off at any old place and rested for 10 hours? I wouldn’t. Unless a place is sanitized to the USDA biosecurity rules I wouldn’t take the risk of contaminating my herd with sickness that was there from the calves before mine. That means more doctoring when they are at the feedlot and an increase risk of death loss.

I don’t really have anything for you when it comes to wanting a farm truck classified as a commercial vehicle. That really does nothing for your argument because they’d still be exempt from hours of service based on them rarely leaving about a 100 mile radius, and even then they would be exempt from the eld because they probably don’t do it more than 8 days a month. I think the farthest my cousin goes is about 60 miles one way. Anything longer than that and they pay to have it hauled or sell it and whoever buys it provides the trucks. It’s not worth it for them to be sitting in a truck all day when they have other things to do.

And the funny thing about subsidies is that there’s a website where you can see exactly how much a farmer/rancher gets and what the payment was for. So far I haven’t found anything like that that shows what corporations get for tax breaks, almost like they’re trying to hide it?

Anyway, I’m done with this discussion now. Have a good weekend.

 

Saying that the hours of service is government overreach weakens your argument in my eyes. They have been around since 1938 and nobody complained about them until about 2017. That’s when we started hearing the cries for getting rid of the hos. Nobody twisted your arm and made you enter a line of work regulated by the federal government.

And if you’re saying that hos is overreach you must not have been around before deregulation.

 

Many of us complained about HOS in the 80s. Not relevant, but thought I'd throw that out there.

 

Trucker have always complained about hos. Grandpa on my mother's side started driving truck around late 70s when farming started to take a beating, lost most of it in the 80s, never had a good thing to say about hos, same goes for my dad and all the uncles that do and have driven truck. I see it entirely as government over reach, there is nothing in the constitution says anything about government being able to tell you how many hours your business can operate. The "interstate commerce" clause should have a line drawn through it, there is literally nothing anymore that could not be called interstate commerce.

 

So you’d be fine with airline pilots working as much as they want? Would you want all federal regulations concerning businesses to go away? Or just the ones you don’t like? I mean if it’s not in the constitution let’s let mines pump waste into the rivers like they used to, right? No need for maintenance schedules for commercial airplanes because it’s not in the constitution, right? I’m sure the airlines don’t like those pesky maintenance costs. See how silly the constitution argument sounds when applied elsewhere? Trucking isn’t the only thing that’s regulated.

I know people have a pie in the sky wish that there’s no hours of service but the reality is the majority of drivers and probably quite a few company owners aren’t responsible enough for that to happen.

 

Sure I'd be fine with letting anybody work the hours they please whatever the hob, when they #### up and kill somebody they are also held personally responsible, and that's the issue people have anymore, nobody wants to be held responsible for their own actions it's always somebody else's fault.