Delmarva-Baltimore paid $14 a mile, reefer's top lane in the week to 18 Aug

In the week to 18 August, the best-paying refrigerated lane was Delaware, Maryland and Eastern Shore Virginia to Baltimore at $14.00 a mile. Before you point the truck at Delmarva, read the second number: that was a 100-mile run worth about $1,400.

The rest of the top of the table looked the same way, short hops out of harvest districts. Delmarva to Philadelphia paid $11.43 a mile over 140 miles, Delmarva to New York $8.70 over 230 miles, Yakima Valley and Wenatchee to Seattle $8.21 over 140 miles, and Vidalia, Georgia to Atlanta $7.78 over 180 miles. High rate per mile, small total check.

That is the whole point of a lane table. A short regional run posts a big rate per mile because the miles are few, not because the load pays well. Judged on total revenue, the fattest haul near the top was Imperial and Coachella Valleys to Seattle, 1,300 miles at $5.58 a mile, about $7,250 for the load. If you are covering a payment, total revenue and the deadhead home matter more than the per-mile headline.

At the other end, the lowest rates per mile were the long westbound hauls into California: Mexico crossings through South Texas to Los Angeles at $2.06 a mile over 1,600 miles, Yakima to Los Angeles at $2.16 over 1,250 miles, and Vidalia to Los Angeles at $2.21 over 2,350 miles, roughly $5,200 for that last one. Long lanes pointed at the West Coast paid the least per mile this week.

The national produce average was $4.14 a mile, down about 1% on the week. On the year it is up 9.1%, so reefer produce is paying meaningfully more than it did a year ago.

Read this as refrigerated produce only. The national figure is an unweighted mean across whichever lanes were active that week, so the mix shifts with the growing season; treat moves in the lane table as more meaningful than moves in the average. The lane figures come from USDA's Agricultural Transportation Open Data and cover 73 origin-destination pairs in the week to 18 August.