Load it yourself!

[farmerm]

Its all well and good until something goes wrong... insurance company will look for any excuse to get themselves off the hook

 

[Jackall]

I’m going to exaggerate this point. Say you had central storage and lorries could clear straight away would anybody leave their jd x9 for example on the headland and the truck driver could use for 20 mins to load his lorry.

 

[cvx175]

Just remember, you can’t jump in a guys lorry and drive it unless you’ve got a hgv license.
And he can’t jump on your teleporter unless he’s done the course, if anything goes wrong the sh## will hit the fan big time, and you’ll be left with a huge bill.

Can't jump on the telehandler until he's done the course? What course? There's no requirement to have a course to use one

 

[DrWazzock]

I give up.

 

[kiwi pom]

Sorry but the attitude you convey in the second sentence illustrates everything that is wrong with farmers’ attitudes to those who work for them.
Effectively you are saying a driver should forego one his daily loads to spend in total a couple of hours on what £12 an hour loading his own lorry through the day. Might not matter so much to an employee driver, but to a self employed owner driver it can be costly.

I'm not 100% up on the UK drivers hours rules but loading their own truck won't make any difference to their driving hours. Loading is 'other work' and most drivers on shorter hauls wont max out their drive time.
Even if they are not driving the loader, as I understand it they should still be on duty, other work and not taking a break, as they are still supervising loading.
Some drivers will try fit a break into loading/unloading though.

 

[DrWazzock]

Well maybe I’m just getting old or something but in my world I feel it’s best that the driver has a rest whilst somebody else loads, and the loader driver has a rest between loads.
Anyway, I’ll move along now.

 

[kiwi pom]

Well maybe I’m just getting old or something but in my world I feel it’s best that the driver has a rest whilst somebody else loads, and the loader driver has a rest between loads.
Anyway, I’ll move along now.

I agree, they should at least get paid more if they are loading/unloading themselves.
When I first got here I used to deliver a lot of bales and the customer would leave something they claimed was a loader at the drop off.
It got ridiculous and very time consuming as some would only lift one bale.
Tactics changed and the boss said if the loaders crap just get one bale on and push the rest off the side with it
That then changed to us hauling a suitable tractor and loader to customers that couldn't provide a decent machine, at their expense. It seemed to focus their minds a bit.

 

[TheTallGuy]

The problem is though that every supplier I know produces a different electronic format of invoice so they end up being scanned or simply output as a pdf. A pdf is of no use whatsoever to quickbooks etc as it’s a bitmap not an alpha numerical file.
Until the whole world use the same always ha numerical file format for invoices which would be possible, then there isn’t much point in moving over to electronic invoices because there isn’t a universally recognised standard.

PDF can contain text, vector and bitmap graphics & binary objects depending on how it has been created. There are even packages that will scan paper copies, read the text on the page and either overlay or replace the text on the page with ascii text - there are even apps to do it using a mobile phone.

I wrote my own VAT accounts package in 1985 on an Amstrad CPC6128. All saved on those dinky 3” non standard discs that A Sugar bought as a cheap job lot. Try retrieving any of that now. Not a chance. Good job I printed it out. Within a decade pdf will probably be as dead as corduroy and about as readable as those 3” discs.
Truth is on paper I can go back to 1876 here.

PDF has been around since 1992, popular since around 1995 & an international standard since 2008 (ISO 32000). Unlike your custom software there are literally thousands of packages out that that can read, edit & create PDF files so even if someone like Adobe dropped support for PDF, there will still be a myriad of other businesses and individuals out there supporting it - if for no other reason than PDF has become so universal. As for storage medium - back in the 80s there wasn't any real standardisation of either storage medium or interfaces, whereas today SATA & USB interfaces are so standard and so ubiquitous that even if they were to head for obsolescence there would be such an overlap that transferring to whatever comes next would be easy.

Digital isn't perfect, but then neither is paper copy, which is bulky, may well fade over time, be eaten by pests or destroyed in fires & floods, etc - & unless you have multiple copies stored in multiple locations in controlled environments you've lost it. Whereas it is possible to fit hundreds of years of data on to a hard disk the size of a paperback book of which you can easily have multiple copies stored in different locations.

 

[essexpete]

I've got carbon based data storage sheets in the loft from 40 years ago.

I have family paperwork going back further, I expect many have but I doubt anyone else will be interested in it.

 

[roscoe erf]

There has been an increasing driver shortage for at least 5-10 years Europe wide. Haulge companies should have been sorting things out to get more UK drivers trained especially once brexit happend. Other things such as new legislation coupled with stuff like foreign drivers leaving and covid has meant there isn’t enough UK based drivers.
There is undoubtedly a lot of poor employers who have used cheap European labour and there is also massive lack of infrastructure in many destinations and they are also taking the pee using lorries as storage which drives people away.
if I took seriously every story a lorry driver had told me the agricultural industry in my part of the world would look very different to what it does!

Driver shortage, heavy compliance making life hard for trucking companies

A shortage of workers is exposing deep-set issues within the road transport industry, with regional Victorian trucking bosses describing mounting issues over safety and properly trained drivers.

www.abc.net.au

 

[TheTallGuy]

It would be easy to get drivers, they just have to double the price of your grain haulage

10 years ago a friend was keen to get into LGV driving, but nobody locally would take him on because as one transport manager said "why would I take a chance on you when I can get licensed foreign drivers in for a little bit over minimum wage?" - so his only option would be to self fund his license & CPC. In order to do that he got a supermarket job & saved up, once he had enough saved he sat down and worked out that the little bit extra pay wasn't worth it. Fast forward to this year & several of the firms that rejected him have been in contact asking if he'd got his licence...

Transport firms are now reaping the harvest of failing to encourage and support new entrants into the trade in much the same way that the NHS has relied so heavily on importing doctors & nurses!

 

[Oliveau]

Can't jump on the telehandler until he's done the course? What course? There's no requirement to have a course to use one

Surely, these days all operators need to have a fork lift certificate, (unless like myself and other pensioners one can claim grandfather rights).

 

[cvx175]

Surely, these days all operators need to have a fork lift certificate, (unless like myself and other pensioners one can claim grandfather rights).

What certificate is that? Unless you are doing construction work there is no such thing. All that's needed is to be competent

 

[Renaultman]

Known, regular, preferred hauliers sometimes load themselves here. No drama

We load ourselves, all over, on our own farms and a lot of regular collection ones. All drivers are ex farm workers and have telehandler licenses.

 

[X344chap]

A lot here seem to be ignoring the fact that any driver using telehandlers, fork lifts and even front end loaders need to have had formal training , if they haven't you the farmer is setting themselves up for a very expensive disaster.

If its only money after a disaster then you are lucky - corporate manslaughter fines start at 5% of your turnover up to life imprisonment.

 

[B'o'B]

What certificate is that? Unless you are doing construction work there is no such thing. All that's needed is to be competent

Be competent AND show that you are competent. In the event of an accident the onus is on you to show that you are competent.
As a farmer who allowed their telehandler to be used by someone else. The onus would be on them to show that they had done due diligence checks to assess the lorry drivers competence for using the handler. That would be pretty hard to do after an accident and with no training record or ticket.

I wouldn't be comfortable letting a stranger loose to load.

 

[JP1]

People in the U.K. have turned pathetic like .

I've said on these type of threads so many times before, I'm glad I'm livestock only and the float driver and me always have to work together

 

[DrWazzock]

PDF can contain text, vector and bitmap graphics & binary objects depending on how it has been created. There are even packages that will scan paper copies, read the text on the page and either overlay or replace the text on the page with ascii text - there are even apps to do it using a mobile phone.


PDF has been around since 1992, popular since around 1995 & an international standard since 2008 (ISO 32000). Unlike your custom software there are literally thousands of packages out that that can read, edit & create PDF files so even if someone like Adobe dropped support for PDF, there will still be a myriad of other businesses and individuals out there supporting it - if for no other reason than PDF has become so universal. As for storage medium - back in the 80s there wasn't any real standardisation of either storage medium or interfaces, whereas today SATA & USB interfaces are so standard and so ubiquitous that even if they were to head for obsolescence there would be such an overlap that transferring to whatever comes next would be easy.

Digital isn't perfect, but then neither is paper copy, which is bulky, may well fade over time, be eaten by pests or destroyed in fires & floods, etc - & unless you have multiple copies stored in multiple locations in controlled environments you've lost it. Whereas it is possible to fit hundreds of years of data on to a hard disk the size of a paperback book of which you can easily have multiple copies stored in different locations.

The thing is though, that the PDF invoice is still useless as input to QuuckBooks. It can’t turn the graphic into the alpha numeric data input it requires. I have to read the pdf myself and type it in manually, but reading a piece of paper and typing it in manually is easier as I don’t need to keep switching between windows to see the data. So pdf invoices sent electronically arent very handy. I’d need a directory on the I cloud to save them then my accountant would need access . Subscriptions, passwords and faffing about.

 

[Lincoln75]

What certificate is that? Unless you are doing construction work there is no such thing. All that's needed is to be competent

There is such a thing and I`m pretty sure its a legal requirement to have formal training -

Forklift Rough Terrain Telescopic - Experienced

www.rau.ac.uk

 

[Lincoln75]

Be competent AND show that you are competent. In the event of an accident the onus is on you to show that you are competent.
As a farmer who allowed their telehandler to be used by someone else. The onus would be on them to show that they had done due diligence checks to assess the lorry drivers competence for using the handler. That would be pretty hard to do after an accident and with no training record or ticket.

I wouldn't be comfortable letting a stranger loose to load.

Which is a bit ironic as you wouldnt have had an accident if you were competent , a formal third party qualification is required , ask your insurance company and HSE if you dont believe me .