BulkLoads Features

Grain brokerage, dry bulk trucking and frac sand transloading all run out of Levelland, Texas, a town most people drive past without a second thought. Shannon Himango invited us down for a rare behind the scenes look at The Titan Company, the operation he has spent more than 30 years building. We walk the office floor, meet the dispatch, brokerage and commodity teams, and get out to the transload facility where unit trains once backed traffic onto the highway and filled the Walmart parking lot with waiting trucks. Shannon came out of the grain trading world at Cargill, and he built Titan’s office the way Cargill built its bullpen, with everyone in one room so information moves between people. That layout is the whole strategy. The commodity side puts together trades, the dispatch side prices and covers the freight, and the two sides create their own loads instead of waiting for someone else’s. Along the way he explains where the boxing kangaroo logo came from, why the company is named after a hockey stick, and why he thinks trucking is harder than trading grain. This one goes deep on how the business actually works. Trading the inverse, what it means to work for the market rather than take a side, trading paper, daisy chains of resellers, how a hay trade gets priced off freight, and why money is the only thing that brings trucks back to a region. We also cover West Texas agriculture itself: 440,000 acres of farmland in Hockley County alone, cotton and peanuts and milo and grapes, the Ogallala water problem, the Texas Triangle corn deficit, and how white sand from Wisconsin gave way to brown sand mined right down the road.

They represent roughly 130,000 truckers in Washington DC, and they have been at it since 1973. We visited the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association headquarters in Grain Valley, Missouri to talk with OOIDA President Todd Spencer and the leadership team about what the organization actually does, how it started, and the fights it is in right now. Broker transparency, insurance requirements, truck parking, hours of service, autonomous trucks and the driver shortage debate all come up. OOIDA was founded in 1973 by five or six angry owner-operators during the Middle East oil embargo, when fuel rationing meant trucks ran from one truck stop to the next and waited in line. Jim Johnston, one of the founders, became president two years in and held the role for 43 years. The numbers behind the mission are striking: about 93 percent of carriers registered with FMCSA run five trucks or fewer, and roughly half run a single truck. Todd Spencer joined as an owner-operator member in 1976, was elected to the board in 1978, and sold his trucks to come on staff in 1981. The back half gets pointed. Spencer explains how deregulation and investor capital reshaped the industry into one run by MBAs, attorneys and accountants rather than truckers, why he calls the driver shortage a myth pushed by carrier executives to lawmakers, what worries him about autonomous trucks, and why he believes people are using technology to exploit the regulations outright. We also hear about John Taylor, who drove into his late eighties and logged somewhere around nine million miles without a recordable accident, and we get a look at the photos on the wall, including the press conference where OOIDA parked triples in front of the Capitol. OOIDA membership runs $45 a year. Call in and mention BulkLoads with code [BULKLOADS35] and it's $35 a year.

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In this episode, we head to Billings, Montana to sit down with Frankie Wilmot, CEO of Corcoran Transportation Group. A company built from two family trucking businesses that split apart, competed for decades, and eventually came back together under one roof. Frankie came into the trucking world from a finance background with almost no industry experience, and four years later he's running a fleet spanning four specialized divisions.

Montana grain hauling has nearly broken Willie Hill more than once. He has been on the verge of bankruptcy more times than he can count, and he has dug his way out every single time. We rode along with Willie Hill of William Hill Trucking during wheat harvest out of Billings, Montana, loading hard red winter wheat at Patriot Farms north of Custer and running it to the elevator in Huntley. Four turns a day, twelve hours a run, starting at 4AM.

Ted Fyock Jr. spent his Army career as an armor officer with the 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq. Today he runs Carolina Expressways, a bulk freight brokerage he started from scratch.

Emery Sapp & Sons is a $1 billion, 100% employee-owned heavy civil construction company with 3,000 employee owners, 98 millionaires, and 600 trucks moving every day.

Down in the hills of southern Missouri, David Day has spent 30 years breeding some of the rankest bucking bulls in the PBR, and it started with a $430 bull out of a sale barn.

We got behind the gates at the International Proving Grounds in New Carlisle, Indiana a 100-year-old semi truck test track built by the Studebaker Corporation in 1926 to see how International breaks brand new trucks on purpose, and to put their newest LT with the S13 integrated powertrain through three laps on the oval.

In the fall of 1992, a farm kid from Lebo, Kansas bought a four-axle dump truck straight out of high school — and drove it home without a CDL. It broke down on Highway 75 on the way back from his license test, and the first vehicle that pulled up behind him was a state trooper.

Most truckers never get to see past the showroom floor. Today we go all the way inside.

The largest hauler of liquid molten aluminum in North America is named after a company that went out of business — because a Central New York farmer didn't want to pay for paperwork.

When his dad died unexpectedly, this family trucking company was losing $1 million a year — so his mom put her husband's entire life insurance payout into the business, and her son dropped everything to save it. This is the story of the Titus family of Central New York, and how a second-generation trucking business on the edge of bankruptcy became one of the most respected transportation companies in America. After the loss of founder Keith Titus, the company fell from $30 million in sales into three straight years of losses. The bank pulled the lines of credit. The lawyers and accountants all said the same thing: sell the trucking company. Instead, a 27-year school bus driver bet everything — the life insurance, even a reverse mortgage on her own home — because she refused to let her employees lose their jobs. Then she called her son Dan and daughter Piper with an offer: half the pay, double the hours. What follows is a raw look at family business succession, sacrifice, and the grit it takes to rebuild a trucking operation from the inside — plus unforgettable stories of the old-school outlaw trucking days, from 2 AM trailer repos in New Jersey to hauling loads to Disney World family vacations.

Out in the desert of St. George, Utah sits one of the most recognized names in diesel performance — PDI (Performance Diesel Inc.). What started with a passion for horsepower turned into one of the most controversial stories in trucking history: federal investigators, EPA fines, deleted trucks, and millions on the line.

Everybody told him no. So he went after the baddest man in Houston County — and when Lee Lundy said yes, everything changed.

They asked one simple question: what if you could sell cattle without the cattle ever leaving the ranch?

Today we're in Cuba, Missouri, the heart of Route 66, where Bill Wallis bought a single gas station in 1968 and built it into Wallis Companies: a fully integrated fuel distribution, trucking, and retail operation running 42 trucks, 67 stores, and 1,400 employees.

In 1960, a stranger handed two brothers $10,000 because the bank wouldn't. Sixty-six years later, their family business builds America's largest and fastest single-auger grain cart — shipped to farmers in 19 countries.

From one watermelon truck in the 1960s to 350 trucks, 1,000 employees, and roughly $200 million in annual sales, the Thomas Keller story is one of the most remarkable build-from-nothing journeys in trucking. We traveled to Defiance, Ohio to sit down with Jonathan Wolfram, President of the trucking group, and walk the yard where it all came together. Tom Keller started by hauling watermelons out of Vincennes, Indiana, drove a load to Detroit, set the cash on the kitchen table, and went back to work the next morning. That hustle turned into Keller Logistics Group: Keller Trucking, Keller Freight Solutions, Keller Warehousing & Co-Packing, and Keller Industrial Properties. In this feature, Jonathan breaks down the strategy that carried the company through the worst freight recession in recent memory while other carriers were shrinking. The answer: relentless diversification. From 9 million square feet of warehouse space to spec buildings, shuttle and spotting contracts, AG hopper expansion, and even managing logistics for college stadium memorabilia, Keller built a business that does not live or die on truckload rates alone. If you run a fleet, own a truck, or move bulk freight for a living, this one is packed with lessons on culture, legacy, and how to build something that lasts.

We came out to Mount Vernon, Missouri thinking this would be a story about cattle — 2,000+ head, one of the largest cow-calf operations in the state's biggest cattle-producing county. What we found was something much bigger.

How One Farmer Reinvented Himself to Survive Agriculture When John Deere let him go, Matt didn't fold — he went home, started renting equipment in his dad's shop, and built a diversified trucking and manure-spreading operation that's survived every market cycle since. In this episode, host Jared Flinn visits Matt and Sharon on location to walk through the equipment, the deals, and the hard lessons behind a business built from the ground up.

60 Years of Trucking Knowledge in 15 Minutes | Rick Johnson & MJ Leasing

When Craig Broerman got the call that his son was in the hospital — while he was loading cottonseed 10 hours from home in North Carolina — he knew something had to change. The next morning, he got another call: his grandpa and best friend had just passed away.

Four generations. One Oklahoma family. Over half a million dollars stiffed by a single solar customer. And the podcast — playing through an earbud in a pig barn — that changed the next chapter of their trucking company. The Blackwells have been working their land outside Wayne, Oklahoma for three generations. Cotton, then cattle. Then 25 years of pipeline restoration that took them from Oklahoma to Florida and back. They built Blackwell Trucking Incorporated on the side — just to keep their own equipment moving.

In 1950, a colorblind farm kid named Wayne started hauling gasoline out of a small Minnesota town with one leased truck. Seventy-five years later, his family runs one of the largest bulk trucking operations in America — 700 trucks, 1,200 trailers, three generations, and a stack of buyout offers they keep turning down.

He Went Bankrupt at 18, Laid Off Every Driver, and Now Runs a $625K-Per-Rig Heavy Haul Fleet | Kendal Mast Kendal Mast started KM Wood Products in November 2012 with one truck — his dad's beat-up rig. By 18, he was nearly bankrupt. In 2019, one of his biggest contracts walked away without paying, and he made the call no fleet owner wants to make: lay off every owner operator, every driver, and go back to just him and one truck. He loaded his wife and kids in the cab and hauled through all of 2020. By August of that year, every driver was back and the fleet had grown. Today, Kendal runs 50 trucks, a fleet of specialty heavy haul trailers worth $625,000 per setup, and 65% of his work is fueling the AI data center boom. We got a full shop tour, talked rates, liability, equipment, and what it actually takes to survive and scale in heavy haul. In this episode:

140 owner-operators. Coast to coast. One office. No terminals. No repair shops. No shortcuts. Autumn Transport has quietly run that way for 45 years — and most people in the industry have never heard of them. In this feature, Jared sits down with Julie Andrich, the president of Autumn Transport, to dig into the origin story her dad built from a failing farm and a single hopper, how they scaled to 140 owner-operators without ever building a terminal or a shop, and what it really took for Julie to step into the seat after her dad passed. This one hits.

900 owner-operators. All independent. All running under the same standard. How does one company pull that off? In this video we go inside Bruce Oakley's owner-operator model — the standards they hold, the equipment requirements, the safety program, and the culture that keeps drivers coming back for decades. We sit down with Jeremy (trucking operations), Roger (safety director and former O/O himself), and talk to drivers who have been running under this name for years. One of them had open heart surgery on the road — and Oakley made sure his truck kept moving while he recovered. This is Video 3 in our Bruce Oakley series. If you haven't watched the first two, start there: ▶ Video 1 — The Empire Story: https://youtu.be/VBIgKXCjX0c?si=0sJTu-_fAHhpYuja ▶ Video 2 — Inside the Barge Operation: https://youtu.be/pk1dvOvaTl0?si=IpOX452wA9QUnf7W

He's already sold out of hay he hasn't baled yet. Jason Wacha runs one of the most in-demand alfalfa operations in Missouri — 2,500 acres, 600 semi-loads a year, and a waiting list that fills before the season starts. In a state where most farmers don't touch alfalfa, Jason went all in. No inherited land. No family farm handed down. Just a business degree, a borrowed tractor, and one dairy farmer who was trucking hay all the way from Kansas. That was 15 years ago. Today, Wacha Farms is the operation everyone in southwest Missouri calls first. In this episode we get inside the full operation — the alfalfa science, the equipment nobody else in this country is running, the 2020 pivot into cattle and direct-to-consumer beef, and the business systems keeping it all moving.

What if the biggest freight network in America was one most truckers have never seen? Every year, the U.S. moves billions of tons of cargo not by truck or rail — but by river. And more than 60% of everything America grows leaves this country through a single port: New Orleans. Almost all of it gets there the same way — by barge. In this episode, Jared Flynn sits down with Bruce Oakley, one of the most fascinating freight operations in the country — 30 towboats, 180 barges, and a logistics network stretching from the Oklahoma border to the Gulf of America, all built on the banks of the Arkansas River in North Little Rock. This one will change how you think about how America's food supply actually moves.

Go behind the scenes at Bruce Oakley, Inc. in North Little Rock, Arkansas — a bulk trucking and logistics operation that's redefining what it means to build a generational American company. With nearly 1,700 employees, 30 towboats, 180 barges, and a fleet of 800+ trucks, this isn't your average trucking company.

In this episode, we travel to Missouri to visit with Mark and the team behind Tri-County Trucking to hear the incredible story of how their family built a diversified business spanning trucking, farming, excavation, sand, and trash services.

From a bluegrass field that grew by accident to one of the Kansas City area's most trusted sod operations — Slater's family has been in the sod business for four generations. We got a full behind-the-scenes tour of the farm, the harvest equipment, the delivery fleet, and a show-quality Peterbilt restoration hiding in the shop. In this video you'll see how sod goes from seed to your yard in 8–18 months, what it takes to cut and deliver thousands of square yards a day, why natural grass is making a comeback at the highest levels of professional sports, and why sod might be the third largest crop in the United States by acreage — and most people have never thought twice about it. What's covered:

109,000 new trucking companies entered the market in 12 months. That’s 300 new competitors per day.

INSIDE E2 TRUCKING: How This Canadian Trucking Company Built a Mission-Driven Empire | Manitoba Ag Hauling Go behind the scenes at E2 Trucking and Red River Grain in Manitoba, Canada—a trucking operation that's redefining what it means to run a successful Canadian transportation business. With 70+ employees, an in-house repair shop, and grain handling facilities capable of storing 3 million bushels, this isn't your average trucking company.

In bulk hauling, time is the one thing you can’t get back. Every minute a truck waits to load or unload impacts throughput, driver availability, and overall profitability.

What happens when a 5th generation farmer with zero trucking experience decides to diversify—and ends up hauling 100% of the freight out of a rail transload facility?

What really happens to a wrecked semi truck? And how can owner-operators save thousands (even six figures) by buying used instead of new?

The 2026 Bulk Freight Conference brought together bulk carriers, shippers, brokers, and industry leaders from across the country for one powerful purpose: connection, growth, and real-world takeaways you can apply immediately.

Welcome to the Friday Morning Livestream from the Bulk Freight Conference 2026 — LIVE in Branson, Missouri! 🚛🔥

LIVE from the Bulk Freight Conference 2026 — the only conference built specifically for bulk trucking. Join bulk carriers, shippers, and brokers as we dive into what’s next for the industry — including how to win more business, cut costs, sharpen operations, and prepare for the freight rebound. Bulk Freight Conference

What does it really take to go from farming to bulk trucking — and still be home with your family?