Delmarva produce hauls topped reefer pay at $14 a mile in the week to 18 August

Refrigerated produce carriers earned the most per mile on short runs out of the Delmarva peninsula in the week to 18 August, where loads from Delaware, Maryland and Eastern Shore Virginia into Baltimore paid an average of $14.00 a mile over about 100 miles. The same origin into Philadelphia paid $11.43 a mile, and into New York $8.70.

Those are the richest per-mile numbers on the board, but per mile is not the same as per load. The Baltimore run grosses about $1,400; the 450-mile Delmarva-to-Boston lane paid less per mile, at $6.67, but about $3,000 a load. Short hauls near a harvest district reward the driver who can turn two or three loads in a day, not the one chasing a single big check.

Outside the Mid-Atlantic, the Yakima Valley and Wenatchee district in Washington paid $8.21 a mile into Seattle, and Georgia's Vidalia district $7.78 into Atlanta -- again, short lanes close to where the produce is picked.

The other end of the table is the long westbound haul. Produce crossing from Mexico through South Texas to Los Angeles paid the least per mile, $2.06 over roughly 1,600 miles, followed by Yakima to Los Angeles at $2.16 and Vidalia to Los Angeles at $2.21. These carry the biggest gross -- the Georgia-to-LA run is about $5,200 -- but the per-mile math is thin once fuel and the return trip are counted.

The national produce reefer average was $4.14 a mile, down 1.0% on the week. That is the second straight weekly decline from a July peak of $4.29, though the average is still 9.1% higher than a year ago.

Carry the caveat: this is refrigerated produce only, and the national figure is an unweighted mean across whichever lanes ran that week, so it drifts with the growing season. Treat the lane table as the better guide to where money moved -- a $14 short-haul rate reflects fixed loading and handling costs spread over few miles, not a lane you can run all day.

For a driver with a reefer, the read this week is regional: the pay per mile is on the short produce lanes out of Delmarva, the Yakima Valley and Vidalia into nearby metros. The long pulls to the West Coast still fill the trailer, but they are working the bottom of the per-mile range.