Nine days, 600 containers
October is the only month where our customers' deadlines are measured in weather windows rather than quarters. Here is how a harvest-season sweep actually gets scheduled.
- Sheet
- 13
- Revision
- 2026-10
- Scale
- 1:1
- Drawn at
- Peoria IL
In most industries a delivery window is a preference. During harvest it is a constraint set by moisture content, and nobody involved has any influence over it.
The specific job: fourteen sites across the US-24 ag loop and the I-74 corridor, 600 containers moving in both directions — hopper conversions and Grade B units out, empties and spent-material containers back — inside a nine-day window that was itself set by when the fields would be dry enough to run.
| Day | Sequence | Out | In | Constraint |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Peoria → Galesburg → Monmouth | 48 | 22 | Grain elevator scale queue before 9am |
| 2 | Monmouth → Quincy | 36 | 40 | Narrow farm lane, box truck only |
| 3 | Quincy → Keokuk → back | 24 | 54 | Ferry-adjacent bridge weight limit |
| 4 | Weather call | — | — | Rain; two sites reshuffled to day 7 |
| 5 | Peoria local sweep | 0 | 86 | No minimum locally, consolidated |
| 6 | Bloomington → Champaign | 60 | 18 | Dock windows at 7am both sites |
| 7 | Reshuffled sites | 42 | 38 | Caught up from day 4 |
| 8 | Canton → Havana → Lacon | 30 | 44 | Three short hops, gravel yards |
| 9 | Final returns to yard | — | 58 | Intake pad staffed for a double shift |
What makes harvest different
- Access changes daily. A field entrance that took a flatbed on Monday is mud on Thursday.
- Nobody is available to meet you. The people who would normally handle a delivery are on equipment. The load plan has to work unattended.
- Scales queue. Elevator traffic makes certain hours impossible regardless of what anybody agreed.
- The deadline is real. A hopper conversion that arrives after the beans are off is a hopper conversion for next year.
How we schedule against weather rather than against the calendar
Book the window, not the day
Harvest customers get a three-day window and a commitment that we will land inside it, rather than a date we will both be renegotiating.
Sequence by access, not by distance
The shortest route is irrelevant if two of the sites turn to mud. Gravel and field-entrance sites go early in the window; paved sites are the flex.
Hold one flex day
Nine-day jobs are planned in eight. The ninth absorbs a rain day, and if it is not needed we pull forward the next week's local sweep.
Make the drop unattended-safe
Staging instructions, photos of where the containers go, caps and valves checked before leaving. Nobody is coming off a combine to supervise us.
Three weather calls in nine days and no missed windows is a good outcome, and it is almost entirely down to the flex day. The one time we have genuinely failed a harvest customer was a year we planned nine days in nine.
If you are on the ag loop
- Order hopper conversions in August. Six working days in season, three out of it, and September is when everybody remembers.
- Tell us the field entrance, not the mailing address. They are different places more often than you would think.
- Consolidate empties. Twelve or more on a lane is free pickup; locally there is no minimum at all.
- Give us the window and the constraint. 'Before the beans' is more useful to us than a date you picked to be polite.
Co-op clearing a season's empties?
We run consolidated sweeps of 200+ containers across the US-24 and I-74 lanes, with one diversion statement for the whole load.