Food for Thought: To Cover or Not To Cover Trucks
Joan Sinclair Petzen, Farm Business Management
Northwest New York Dairy, Livestock & Field Crops
A quick look shows the price of these devices range from around $700 to $1,000. So let's take a quick look at the economics. At the high end of the price range, a farm would need to save 25 tons of as fed feed to break even on the purchase of a tarp system for each truck.
Looking at this another way, haul feed for 1,000 cows, and 55% of their diet comes from forage, in the course of the year one would need to haul over 16,000 tons of as fed forage. If without a tarp, 1/2% of that feed is lost to blow-off between the field and the storage, then, 80 tons of feed is left lying along the roadside somewhere between your field and your feed storage. At $45 per ton, $3,600 in forage is lost without covering loads.
Information on the amount of feed lost in this manner is not readily available but it gives us something to ponder. If your farm could invest $3,200, cover 4 dump trucks and save 80 ton of feed each season, would it be worth it?
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