Have Feed? Will Travel?

Farming and livestock provides a great deal of revenue for many people across the United States, and with today’s technology, the amount of farmland available, as well as the fertility level of American soil, it’s no small wonder. It’s because of this that we not only have food, but have it fresh and of a high quality (and quantity!). However, having a farm that can produce enough food to sell to be successful is one thing; being able to produce enough crops to feed your livestock is something else entirely.

For that reason, feed mills have become very successful in areas where farming and livestock are prevalent. Feed mills have the ability to store and ship large quantities of grain and animal feed to where it’s needed. While the storing of feed is fairly simple, it’s the transportation that can be difficult.

To ship bulk feed safely and efficiently to a various types of customers, a specially designed piece of transport equipment is needed. Unlike the days of the past when feed was always delivered in bags or box trucks, the increased demand from today’s farmer has changed how present-day feed deliveries are made.

Lower Costs and Higher Profits

When selling feed, your costs will be dictated by how efficient you can be in your deliveries. The heavier the transportation equipment for the feed, the less product you can actually carry due to legal weight transport limitations. The trick is to find something that is both ultra-durable and light, which will allow you to carry a heavier payload, all while reducing fuel consumption. Aluminum has become the preferred metal of choice for this very purpose.

Additionally, you must consider just how big your client’s needs are. If you’re servicing several small farms, it’s possible to use smaller equipment; however, in adding more farms or larger orders, you’ll have to make multiple trips or buy larger equipment that can haul more payloads. While making more trips allows you to use the current feed transport equipment you have, it can increase maintenance costs, be less efficient, and run up the fuel costs.

Having larger equipment, on the other hand, might be a large initial investment, but it also means that you have the ability to be more efficient, allowing you to service more customers of your own and grow your business. This ultimately allows you to pick up more business and become more successful.

What to Do When You Arrive 

It’s not enough to just have a means of transporting the feed. You also need to have an efficient means of unloading the feed to the storage area or bins. Whether you’re selling bag or bulk feed, unloading is just as important and as technically involved as transporting. With bag feeds, it’s a little easier, as it can be moved manually or on skids with a forklift. Bulk feed, on the other hand, requires a bit more effort, as well as equipment.

Feed can be unloaded by air pressure through pipes or an overhead stinger into the storage bins or through an auger unload system that would include an auger boom to get the product to the top of a storage bin. In the past an air system was popular because it was the earliest system to be adopted for this purpose. However, the air system is slower than an auger system and requires more equipment, raising the costs. In recent years, an auger unload system has been preferable due to its higher capacity; additionally, companies incur less cost purchasing this type of equipment.

The air unload system will be still used for years to come due to older farms not having the ability to unload feed any other way, but in time, the auger system could come to supersede the air unload system entirely. Developing a system, as well as fostering an understanding with your clients as to how their feed will be unloaded, can go along way towards making a customer happy, as well as loyal.

Service, Service... Service 

When looking for the equipment, it’s important to find a dealer who is not only reputable, but who is also able to service the equipment they sell you. EMM Sales and Service Inc. is a prime example of such a dealer. Based out of central Pennsylvania, EMM specializes in a wide selection of bulk feed trucks.

In the late ‘90s, an effort to better serve our clients, we relocated to a facility that allows us to not only sell, but also service the equipment we sell in our 18,000 square foot facility. It’s this dedication to service that has allowed us to become one of the largest feed transportation equipment dealers in the country.

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The Lifeblood of America

The United States is a huge nation, and its heartland produces quite a bit of the food that the more populated East and West coasts consume every day. A country the size of America, both in population and in geographic proportions, requires quite a bit of food to be grown every year. Considering the size of our agricultural industry, and the distance between farms and major population centers, it is no surprise that the transportation of agricultural products has become a major industry critical to the continued health and prosperity of our society.

How We Stay Fed

Wheat, corn, and other grains are largely grown in the Midwest. These foods make up the foundation of the American diet; bread and other carbohydrates are a big part of what we eat in every meal, every day. Yet the amount of grain that must be grown each day in order to meet our ever-increasing demand is far more than individual farmers can handle; they are equipped to grow their crops, but they are not equipped to transport the fruits of their labor to the factories that create the final product – bread, cereal, and so on.

Grain isn’t only used to feed us, however; it is also used to feed the livestock of other farmers. We have a very big appetite for meat in America and, more and more, across the world. The more meat we want to eat, however, the more animals that need to be raised, which means they need to be fed. More than that, they need to be fed the proper nutrients in order for them to grow properly, and that means feeding them exceedingly well.

Quite a bit of our agricultural produce – corn, soybeans, and other grains – goes to livestock farmers to feed their animals. This, in fact, is part of what has made ethanol gasoline a difficult proposition in America; so much of the corn that would otherwise be going into the production of ethanol instead goes to pig farmers and other livestock. In other words, the feeding of our livestock is of a greater priority than alternative energy sources.

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Keeping Things Moving

This is where the agricultural transportation industry comes in. Feed and grains have to be transported not just to processing plants to make our food, but to make feed for the livestock that will… also… become our food. It all ends up in our bellies, but there are many roads to Rome. Farmers need not only to transport the grain the harvest but also they need to transport their livestock to market to sell them. EMM Sales & Service, Inc. carries the full line of Wilson Grain and Livestock Trailers that can be used to help in this accomplish these tasks.

There are a variety of ways to transport feed, but whatever method is used, it has to be able to handle the high volume that the industry puts out. Whether the feed is being transported by train or trailer, a container that can’t withstand the shifting weight and pressure that will be put on it regularly and not be able to transport it efficiently will quickly fail the transportation service, losing it quite a bit of money and business. This is why EMM Sales & Service, Inc. is one of the largest dealers for Walinga Feed Transportation equipment in the United States.

The Cost of Doing Business

Even when a transportation service uses high quality equipment and methods, repairs are a regular part of doing business. Transportation services that use trailers must have a repair service on hand that they can trust to get the job done quickly and correctly when it comes to repairs, which is exactly the kind of work EMM Sales & Service, Inc. does.

Whether your hydraulic systems need an overhaul, your bed liner needs repaired, augers need replaced, you have accident damage that needs fixed or any number of other repair services are required, a quality transportation repair and installation service can take care of all of that and more. Services like EMM can repair all brands of dump bodies and trailers and grain trailers, though they often have specialties that make them particularly suited to working with one or another transportation service. For example, EMM’s specialty is in repairing feed transportation equipment and trailers.
 

The transportation of feed is an essential part of our agricultural system in the United States. Without the feed that livestock producers receive, we would be unable to eat meat milk and eggs in the quantities that we demand and it would drive up the price of these foods to absurd proportions – leading to a lack of protein in the diets of many people across the country, which could mean malnutrition among low-income populations that could not afford the increasingly-expensive meat and food items on the market. Efficient, well-run agricultural transportation services are what keep food affordable and our children healthy, and quality agriculture transportation equipment sales and repair services are what keep them in business.