Custom harvesting is the most concentrated fuel operation in agriculture. A crew that starts cutting in the southern plains in early summer and follows the ripening crop north works combines through long days, moves them between jobs on trucks, hauls grain from field to elevator, and drags a camp of campers and service vehicles up the map behind it. For the months the run lasts, a modest crew sits at the top of the small-business fuel range, burning thousands of gallons in a busy month, and almost every gallon is bought at retail somewhere the crew has never fueled before.
The pricing structure makes that exposure sharper. Custom rates are quoted to farm customers before the season, per acre or per bushel, and they hold across the run. Diesel is the crew's largest operating cost after labor and iron, and it gets purchased across a season and a half a dozen states at whatever each town's pumps happen to charge that week. A fuel market that climbs mid-run cannot be passed along to a farmer who agreed to a rate in March. It just comes out of the crew.
A ceiling that crosses state lines
FuelAnchor is a fuel supply company. You request a quote for the gallons you expect to use, and it returns a locked maximum price per gallon for your term. You prepay the gallons, then fill using a FuelAnchor card at the stations you choose. Below the locked maximum, you pay the local pump price. Above it, your rate holds at the number you signed, in whichever state the crew happens to be cutting.
That geography point is the heart of the fit. A harvest crew cannot build relationships with a fuel supplier in every county it passes through, and it may not know in May which specific stations it will use in August. The designated-station list handles that: you designate the stations that fit the run, from co-op pumps at the edge of a wheat town to the truck stops on the grain haul, and the list can be updated during the term as the crew moves north. Coverage areas in the quote are defined around where you expect to fuel, and a crew that runs a known corridor every year can describe that corridor when it asks.
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The run is the term
Agreements run 1, 3, 6, or 12 months, and for a harvest crew the match is unusually clean.
The classic summer run fits a 3 or 6 month agreement, quoted in late spring when the crew already knows its bookings. The acres are committed by then, and last year's fuel records say what a season burns, so the gallons estimate is about as solid as estimates get in agriculture. Prepay that volume, and the largest variable cost of the run is bounded before the first field is opened. A crew that also cuts a fall season, or runs silage and fall crops after wheat, can extend the same logic across a longer agreement.
The short end has its uses too. A crew taking on a single added job, a few weeks of silage chopping or a late booking outside the normal run, can put a 1 month agreement under just that work. And an outfit that wants to test the arrangement before trusting a whole season to it can quote one month of the run and see how the ceiling behaves in practice.
Asking is the easy part
Every quote is computed at the moment you request it, from current prices across your coverage area, your fuel types, your monthly volume, and your term. There is no rate card, and this year's quote will not look like last year's, because the market does not either. Diesel for the combines and trucks and gasoline for the pickups and camp vehicles are priced independently in the same request, and off-road diesel is among the listed fuel types.
The bookings are made and the machines are ready months before the wheat is. The fuel number can be ready then too. Request a quote with your expected gallons and your corridor, and take one guess out of the run before it starts.
🔒 Your information is never shared.
This form saves your progress automatically as you go.