Hopper, Dump O/O's & Drivers

I had to start backing out of the parking lot before they ran out to stop me. The supervisor told the guy filling in for the foreman, who's on vacation, that I wasn't to be unloaded until monday before getting in his car and going home for the weekend. I told them that they were shutting down my business, I had another load at our job site to pick up and since the load was now legally mine under federal law I'd just have my loader guy drag it off onto the ground at our site until we figured out what to do with it. They called the supervisor and he changed his mind. Finally unloading.

The down side is that I tried to turn around in their narrow lot before deciding on backing out into the street. That maneuver let all the air out af a rear trailer tire. I blame Pharm for this.

 

The guys I work for have 3 9760 Deere combines. They use either draper or stripper headers. These boys have 2 Honeybee's and 1 Deere draper. They have a stripper but last year the hurricanes blew a bunch down. The stripper won't pick up down rice so he had to cut standing rice while the other 2 crept thru the down rice. So they got another draper. On the plus side in standing rice the stripper can go much faster cuz he don't have all that seperation going on. The big boss also thought the stripper was causing more shatter loss as it hit the stalks. Rice comes fast cuz yields run 150-220 bu/acre in a normal year. We run a buggy for each combine. Big (to me) buggies 750-900 bu.. The trucks have to stay out of the fields cuz they're usually muddy and have levees in em so we have to load on loading pads usually or occasionally the gravel road if we're in one of the more desolate lightly traveled areas. We run 4 trucks. Usually at least 1 man runs the loading at the bins. I run the trucks. Usually after we get going I take a load to the bin and he's got an empty ready to go back. If we catch up I'll help him spot over the driveover. These driveovers are only 10-12 inches wide so the truck must be moved forward several times as the hopper empties. It also gets kind of hairy when the bin is near full and somebody has to be up top watching that. We can't overfill the bins much cuz they have to be leveled for drying/airflow purposes. This may have been TMI wheathauler but I just kind of got goin there.

 

Yep in good rice when them 3 big binders are all goin good it keeps me hoppin. That's where all these rocks I'm hauling are goin-loading pads and bin lots.

 

I couldn't keep up if we were hauling to the dryer. But going to the on farm bins mostly it's 3-4 miles sometimes closer and max of about 8 miles. Now in a good year we'll fill the bins and the last of the green rice will have to go to the dryer straight from the field. 1 driver can't near bout keep up with that. It's 25-45 miles 1 way depending which farm we haul from to the nearest dryer. The lines in the fall are long usually at the dryer as well. That's not a good scenario for us.

 

Wheathauler I thought you might be interested. If I can c and p here's the stuff we load bins with. I'm not selling nothing so I hope I don't get banned but here goes.
1. Driveover that we dump on.


2. Belt loading augur

We link these together. Driveover dumps on belt augur which goes to the bin. The belt augur is PTO driven while the driveover is hydraulic.

 

Well I'm home now.

I had those 4 loads, 2 to do Thursday and repeat on Friday. Well it took both thursday and friday to do the first two. Just 300 miles out to VA and 300 back to NC. All due to delays. These companies have no problem putting you out of business. Got to Perdue in VA at opening and didn't leave until 2pm to dump for 4 minutes. They were testing all the wheat and each test was an hour. Don't know how many they could do at once but there was a lot of us and were there half the day.

When I untarped I saw that that other tire I slashed had finally blown the sidewall. Hunted a tire place and they dragged their feet too, spent an hour and a half to get that done. Blazed a trail for the return shipper. Basically got there at the exact time I was supposed to be leaving to deliver on time. Well didn't matter, they tell me they didn't have any poultry meal ready and would have to make it, probably be 5 hours, waiting on a shipment of feather meal as an ingredient.

So I called my broker and I suggested that I just dh home and do both the next day's loads since this place was only going to get one of them anyway at this point. He called the receiver and they wanted me to wait. For the first time I got $20/hr detention pay. It's not a lot but at least I felt better about my time being at least a little respected.

Anyway, it was way more than 5 hours. I had got there at 4pm, the feathermeal didn't get there until 1am, I was loaded at 2:30am, then they said I couldn't leave anyway because the office didn't open up until 7am to give me my BOL's. I finally left at 8am

They did pay me 15 hours detention though of which I slept a good lot of it. $260.

I guess that would have been my take on at least one of the other loads I missed anyway.

I get to try this again Monday though too. No better loads came available. This time they are scheduled over 4 days though for the 4 loads! I told him no good, he said I could pick up early. I hope that's the case, because I intend to be completely done by Tuesday, not Thursday. I will give them back if it drags out.

Says we have "end of the month" syndrome again. Slowing up.

So I only grossed $1200 last week. Pretty terrible and my bank account is suddently in disarray from a couple of miscalculations and extended bills. I really have to hope for no truck problems next week at all or this could be bad.