Reefer's best-paying lane paid $12.50 a mile out of Delmarva last week

The best-paying refrigerated lane in the week to 8 September paid $12.50 a mile: a 100-mile run from the Delaware, Maryland and Eastern Shore Virginia produce district into Baltimore, worth about $1,250 for the load. It topped 73 active produce lanes tracked by the USDA.

Short beat long, by a wide margin. The five highest per-mile lanes were all regional produce hauls. Delmarva to Philadelphia paid $11.79 a mile (140 miles, about $1,650). The Yakima Valley and Wenatchee district of Washington into Seattle paid $9.29 (140 miles, about $1,300). Delmarva to New York paid $8.04, and Georgia's Vidalia district into Atlanta paid $7.22. None of them runs more than a few hours.

The long westbound hauls paid the biggest single checks and the lowest rate. Salinas-Watsonville produce to Chicago cleared about $6,200, the fattest total on the board, but over 2,220 miles that works out to $2.79 a mile. Vidalia to Los Angeles paid roughly $5,200 for 2,350 miles, or $2.21 a mile, the week's lowest. The top lane paid nearly six times that per mile.

So what do you do with it? If you run reefer and can position on the Eastern Shore or a Pacific Northwest produce district, the short regional runs are where the money per mile sits this week. The transcontinental loads look good on the rate confirmation total and keep the truck loaded, but you are trading rate for miles: $2 to $3 a mile spread over two days or more.

Across all 73 lanes the national produce reefer rate averaged $4.11 a mile, down 0.25% on the week, which is essentially flat, and up 8.2% on the same week a year ago. The reefer premium has held through the season.

This is refrigerated produce only, and the national figure is an unweighted mean across whichever lanes were active that week, so the mix shifts with the growing season. Treat week-to-week moves in the lane table as more meaningful than moves in this average.