How JLC Delivers Bulls: The Whole Process, from Lease Order to Your Gate
Jorgensen Land & Cattle ·
How JLC Delivers Bulls: The Whole Process, from Lease Order to Your Gate
JLC delivers and picks up roughly 6,000 bulls over the year, and close to 3,000 of them in June alone. On The Source, Brian Jaeger, JLC's logistics and trucking head, walked Jamie Wolf through how it all works. Here's the full process, in order.
Step 1: The Order Goes In
When a bull is leased, the order goes into HubSpot, which JLC uses as its CRM. A recent improvement is Agra Logistics, a program Nick built. It takes the order from HubSpot and places it on a map of the United States. Brian can populate the map by date, or change the date, which shows him where deliveries cluster.
One caution: the address in HubSpot is what places an order on the map, but states aren't uniform. Northeast Montana is very different from Great Falls, and a load going to northeast Montana may fit better with bulls going to North Dakota than with another Montana load.
Step 2: It's Not A to B
Most of the trucks on Midwest and Great Plains highways are going from a ranch to a sale barn, a sale barn to a feedlot, or a sale barn back to a ranch. JLC's deliveries aren't like that. "It's not an A to B situation. It's an A, B, C, and then three people meet at C and you go to D."
Brian says trucking, like anything, is based on who you know. He learns people's routes, such as which trucks are going from Winner to Kansas and will be coming back empty, so a short load can ride at a better rate. With fuel and rates where they are, paying full rate on everything "will eat you up."
A recent example: Jud Kaiser, from a trucking company in town, called asking if JLC had anything near Minitare, Nebraska. Brian looked at the spreadsheet he shares with Hannah and saw 28 head of bulls newly added from a ranch in Lakeside, Nebraska. He also knew of a bull in Torrington that needed to be picked up, so he had that customer meet the truck in Minitare, and the truck continued to Lakeside. It helped Jud cut his empty miles and let JLC get a fair rate. When possible, Brian also uses lease customers who own trucks. His mentality: "Do business with those that do business with you."
Step 3: Scheduling the Week
There isn't much that can be planned far out. Brian typically works about a week ahead, starting on Monday, and tries to use JLC's driver, Lane, as much as possible. He books the week in an Excel sheet Jamie set up, with every customer's name and which driver is assigned.
Yellow: He reached out and didn't get a solid answer.
Green: He reached the customer and they're good to go on that day.
He starts with the largest customer on a load and works down to the smallest. It's not always fair, he admits. If the 25-bull customer can do a given day and the one-bull customer can't, sometimes he has to be the bad guy and tell the smaller customer to make it work. "I've been told I'm the only one not accommodating at this place. It's not because I don't choose to be. It's because to make it all work, it's kind of got to be."
Step 4: The Phone Call
Around June 10, for a turnout date of June 20, Brian calls to say when JLC would like to bring the bulls. A customer with a full load gets bulls at the door. One Ogallala customer takes 25 bulls and a neighbor takes 15; the customer picks the day, the neighbor goes along, and at pickup the bulls come off one truck and go onto another at his corral. "That customer is very easy to make a delivery to."
A customer leasing only three bulls probably won't get front-door delivery, so Brian asks them to meet the truck.
Step 5: Where to Meet
Sale barns work well. Sometimes JLC asks to meet at a larger customer's place, because they're usually set up to handle a pot of bulls and to step a bull off to the side. A customer who leases three bulls and runs 60 cows may not have a yard where a driver wants to back around three times to reach the chute.
Why a Week Early Sometimes Happens
To keep costs down and lease prices reasonable, a customer may be asked to take bulls a week earlier than they'd like. Brian doesn't love doing it, since things happen on a customer's place and JLC might need to send a replacement bull before turnout. He puts the extra cost of a delivery that doesn't line up at roughly $150 each way, at a minimum. "It doesn't seem like a lot, but you start putting that $300 on 4,600 leases, it's real business." If a truck is already close to a customer's place and the same load won't be there the next week, JLC may have to ask.
Step 6: Sorting and the June Rush
June 2026 was close to 3,000 bulls, with stretches of 200 a day for a couple of days. Bulls have to be sorted ahead of loading, and timing matters. Brian wants Lane home at a decent hour on Friday, which means Monday's bulls get sorted over the weekend. He doesn't like bulls standing around sorted up with bulls they haven't been penned with, especially in the spring when they're fighting. Injured bulls cut into inventory. For Friday sorting, he asks the crew how many they can handle: 300 head of bulls standing around on hay is a lot.
The middle of the week is easier. On Monday morning, after the team meeting, everyone knows what they need to sort for Tuesday.
JLC now has two loading facilities, and Brian has to decide which one a load should leave from. Being in the office helps; Philip Jorgensen, the outside manager, often sits down in Brian's office to talk about what's going on outside.
Working Around Sale Barn Calendars
If JLC is dropping bulls at a barn, Brian tries to avoid that barn's sale day. Because most bulls go west, where fewer fat cattle sales happen, barns there are usually accommodating and set up for large seasonal numbers. Pickup is trickier. A barn out west might have 1,500 yearlings because of a drought, or 1,500 calves from someone who had to move them. By now he knows the sale day of nearly every sale barn in South Dakota.
Step 7: Paperwork
Loading a truck is the easy part. A lot of paperwork has to line up first.
Brand inspection. South Dakota is a brand inspection state. Brian now holds his own brand inspection license. Previously a brand inspector had to drive out for every load, and at 70 to 75 cents a mile, a 30-mile trip for one replacement bull could add around $20 for a single animal. Doing it in house is cheaper and more convenient.
Health papers. When cattle cross state lines they need health papers, and those don't happen overnight. Hannah handles much of this. She has to know which states require a 30-day trich test, and make sure every bull, especially the early ones, has been semen tested on schedule.
This is why Brian schedules as far ahead as he can. "It's easy for me to call the truck. Everything else has to line up to go with it."
On pickups from out of state, the customer's vet has to write the health paper. Health papers are good for 30 days, so customers have time, and Brian says bulls rarely sit that long. Customers who wait until the day of pickup to call the vet can hold up the whole load. The brand inspection is the more time-sensitive piece.
Step 8: The Driver
Brian says JLC's trucking isn't a job for just any driver. A trucking company once offered to bid on all of JLC's hauling, and his response was that their drivers couldn't handle what JLC's drivers do. When bulls are mixed on a truck, the driver has to sort each bull and load it with the right customer, and the driver is responsible for the phone calls with customers. So JLC uses local trucks it knows, lease customers who own trucks, and people it trusts to handle both.
Since no one from JLC is on the truck, the driver has to communicate when something goes wrong: a hiccup, trouble sorting, or a delay. Jamie calls it a customer service issue, and JLC wants customers to know what's happening and when.
Not all of JLC's trucking is this complex. For long hauls to sales, such as California, Brian can catch a backhaul at a lower price. Those loads just go to the sale barn and unload like any feeder calf, so almost any driver can do them.
When It Goes Wrong: Two Stories
A full day in Montana. Back when Jamie was doing the dispatching, JLC's driver Lane loaded a set of bulls at a customer's place, but the paperwork wasn't done. Lane got sent around Montana for a full day to get it done so he could bring the bulls back to South Dakota.
A night in Miles City. Before Brian worked at JLC, when he was driving truck, JLC had delivered bulls into one Montana county and the customer sent them to another county to put out on grass. Montana inspects county to county, and when Brian arrived for pickup, the customer didn't have a brand inspection. He had to overnight in Miles City and work with the sale barn there to get what he needed. The staff worked hard to help him.
As Brian puts it, not everyone knows what it takes to get the bulls back. "The people that do a good job of it, you sure do appreciate it, because it makes life simple."
Five Tips for Customers
Give a good address. Make sure JLC has the right one and knows where the bulls are going.
Tell the driver if Google Maps is wrong. When the driver calls, let them know if the pin won't take them to the right place.
Share the details once, directly. Brian can't keep track of where 500 customers live, and every time directions get passed along, they can get lost or changed.
Be flexible where you can. JLC wants to accommodate everyone, but for less-than-load orders it helps when customers work with the schedule and are willing to meet at a sale barn or a larger neighbor's place.
Get your paperwork done early. Don't wait until the day of pickup to call the vet for health papers.