Sustainability: Transportation

Our company trucks travel over 60 million miles annually. Each year our trucks use nearly 14 million gallons of fuel to deliver chicks, grain and supplies to our growers, and products to our customers. Fuel efficiency is a critical issue made even more important as a result of the rising price of oil, and we are taking aggressive steps to improve fuel efficiency and reduce fuel usage company wide.

Conserving Fuel

One of the things we have done to help conserve fuel has been to install GPS tracking systems in our over-the-road trucks. These systems allow us to monitor speed, distance, time, fuel usage and even rapid deceleration and hard starts, which gives us useful information to help us improve fuel efficiency and fleet safety.

We have implemented a policy to reduce idle time to help save fuel, because it takes approximately one gallon of diesel fuel per hour to idle a tractor-trailer. We are currently testing a two-cylinder diesel auxiliary power unit that can reduce our fuel usage by 80% during idling as well as a new electric auxiliary power unit that uses an environmentally friendly absorbed glass mat (AGM) battery that contains no free liquid, doesn't cause corrosion and can never leak acid.

We are also in the process of converting our driver vehicle inspection reports to an electronic process, which will not only make this process more efficient, but will have the added benefit of reducing our paper usage by thousands of pounds per year.

We are developing metrics that will allow us to determine the "food miles" required for the transport of all of our raw materials and all of our finished products. By implementing these and other measures, we anticipate that we will be able to improve fleet fuel efficiency by as much as 20% over the next four years.