Harvest Truck Training

Imagine that the weather is perfect and that time of the year has arrived to harvest your sugar beet crop or your potatoes or whatever else you’ve shed blood sweat and tears and irrigated water on over the summer. One thing you know is that when you pull ‘em out of the ground, they have to end up somewhere, like in a truck.

 Chet Jeppesen, a local Idaho Department of Labor employee and member of the chamber's agriculture committee says "Farmers are limited in the amount of time they have to harvest potatoes and sugar beets. They start when their crops reach maturity and must be finished before freezing temperatures set in. Without access to truck drivers during harvest, the chances of the valued crops being frozen in the ground grows greater."

 That’s why the Mini-Cassia Chamber of Commerce is offering a truck driver training program to help area farmers manage a potential surge of drivers for this year's harvest and provide extra income for area residents. Here’s Chet: “We initiated a harvest truck driving program where people could come into a one day session, get a little bit of classroom training, and a short hands-on training, on how to drive a harvest truck which hopefully would spark an interest in them helping out at the harvest, plus give them a basic knowledge of the operation of a 10 wheel truck.”

The next training session is July 10^th.