Attention Milk Haulers!! ✌

You will hate it.

You start before sunrise. At the first farm o dark early. Your route and farm pickup sequence is not up to you. It is a bit socialistic having everything dictated to you. You will be at your truck 4 am feeding ice, checking for tank problems in the night and warming your tractor and gathering sample cups etc.

The first farm has already milked a herd of cows probably the night before and has a 10,000 pound tank of milk cooling and stirring waiting for your truck to be on their property at 5:10 am. Time for you to be regular like clockwork. The farms do talk to one another when you leave for the next. You stop for nothing. And if you had to strictly a bare minimum, not even a couple of minutes.

You get to the dairy, your real work begins by noon. First in sitting in line then waiting on dairy to approve your tanker of milk. If the nose likes it plus your samples properly marked etc is good, they will clear you to unload into theirs. When you are doing that you pull the valves break them down and get all the milk curdle and fat out of the internals so your tanker is sanitary when empty and pull to the main wash and sanitation side. Open hatch all the way and stick the firesticks into the tanks and get off it. Wait until sanitized.

Close everything up with small seals usually a bit of wire or something so you know that no one messed with it for next morning. Go home.

Over and over and over. Your life is ruled by the odark early getting to the first farm by 5:10 in my example. Your family, your commitments etc do not matter. 5 days a week you are on time like clock work. no matter the weather.

If you are always on time prompt and do not have trouble with samples and such you will keep your job. If not? You will be replaced and dismissed.

The other thing for you. Before doing milk, you go to your state's testing office to be certified to collect milk under a legally binding number assigned to you when you initial the weight of the tank offloading at he farm because that is what the farmer will be paid on. he knows #### well how much to the pound already. You should too once measuring is finished.

You also must retain a courage to if you assess the milk to be bad, not cooled, not clean and infested etc and off color in particular, you do not load it into your tank. You contact dispatcher and have them tell the farm to dump it as you go to the next farm. That alone is already a big deal and a storm in a teacup is raised. Today you have the ability to video in real time the situation with the poor product. You will use that to show its really bad. You will not ruin the rest of the milk in your tanker.

 

Instead of listening to someone who likely only has ever hauled milk was by the gallon from the grocery store...

@ad356 hauls milk in NY and will hopefully be able to answer your question.

 

Yer welcome.

I left out one item. Some farms you may be rock crawling or teetering off a ravine while pivoting your tanker keeping the tandems where they are spinning in place. It may scare you, it may motivate you I don't know. Its not for everyone.

 

That was just funny!!! Thank you for that!!!

 

Depends what you're doing. Hauling bulk from transfer station to dairy is a gravy job, like a linehaul. Farm pickup, like x1 so thoughtfully pointed out, is a different game. Many farm pickups start at 4 am,be to the 1st farm by 5, and who knows what you will run into. x1's description of the farms is a bit outdated. Years ago, you would pick up at every mom and pop farm, maybe they had 30-50 cows, now, it's all these mega farms, with 2 or 3 THOUSAND cows, and most places are state of the art and have special areas for their tanks. Some big farms might even be drop and hook. Farm pickup puts in long hours, sometimes well after dark, and 7 days a week, cows don't take a break. The plus side, most the farms, the people are great, they'll leave cookies for you, help you, the milkman is #1 with them, they couldn't do their job without you, and they know it. Cops leave you alone, ( they know who you are)and you never go over a state scale, no logs, you might like it, if you can stand the stench, that is..

 

I will chime in. It hasn't been horrible for me. I either start at 4am or 6am depending upon if I have an extra load to go to the plant. Going to the local plant is 8 miles from our yard and 8 miles back. It pays an extra 50 bucks and I give myself an extra 2 hours to do it. Sometimes it takes that long other times it doesn't and I have extra time. I do 4 of these a week nets $200 extra a week. I probably average somewhere around 20 bucks an hour. I get $175 for my route which takes around 8 hours to complete on AVERAGE. Add extra loads of which sometimes I do 2 a day I have had quite a few $275 days.

I start my farm route at 6am. I pickup a loaded trailer at a farm minutes from our yard. They do live loading there, that is milk directly into a trailer after milk passes through a chiller. I drop the loaded trailer in our yard and pickup an empty. I go to my first two farm stops and take that load back to our yard. Another driver delivers those loads to a plant 3 hours away. I hook another empty and go to 3 more farms. I either take that load back to the yard, deliver it myself, or hold it over and I take it myself the next morning. Depends upon what the delivery schedule is and what I personally want to do. Of I'm the delivering driver I can take it myself that day or the next morning.

I can't comment on other people's routes but I can tell you what I do. You will also need a receiver license if you do farm pickup. The state administers the test. It's fairly easy only a dummy could fail it.

Hauling milk is not a terrible gig. It's been my first real starter job. There WILL be things you might not like, like waiting at the plant.... But you won't be over the road, if otr is not what you want or what you can do. Some people otr is not a fit. Take the good with the bad, do it for a couple of years and enjoy it. There is much worse you could be doing.... Werner Swift Schneider jb hunt come to mind.

I have made 47k so far this year. I have an interview with UPS today and will not be sure what I will do if I'm offered a job. I don't hate what I do.

 

Not all small dairy operations are gone. I have 1 farm that has 100 cows and several that have 180-200 cows. I do 5 stops a day and load 2 trailers. My largest farm has around 450 cows. The smaller farms are generally picked up every other day. My 2nd trailer is made up of 3 farms one day and 3 completely different farms the next day.

Small farm with 100 cows will have 10-14k of milk when I pick them up..... Every other day.

 

One con of these jobs they don't offer the best medical or retirement benefits. Even so it's a great local starter job