We buy trucks in Rochester

The node attached to Rochester is Prairie Mills Products, a grain milling operation in Fulton County. The county comes from the row’s own coordinate rather than from a name field, so it is as good as that coordinate and no better.

What a mill of this kind does to the roads is straightforward: it pulls raw grain in by truck from the growing country around it, on a working draw put at 150 miles. That is a lot of farm ground feeding one set of gates, and the trucks doing it are farm trucks and grain hauls rather than line-haul equipment.

Because that is the traffic, the rule that earns space on this page is the one Indiana wrote for it rather than a general freight rule.

A farm commodity moving from the place of production to the first point of delivery where it is weighed may run up to 10 per cent over the gross weight limit. The same allowance covers logs, wood chips, bark and sawdust, and from 2025 aggregate as well.

Two conditions cut it straight back. It is void on any weight limit imposed for a bridge or for a section of highway, so a posted crossing removes it entirely. And it is void on any part of an interstate highway. It is a rule for the road between the field and the scale, and nowhere else.

Ind. Code § 9-20-4-2. Information, not legal advice.

That allowance is a percentage of something, so the something matters. Indiana’s maximums are 80,000 lb gross, 20,000 lb on a single axle, 34,000 lb on a tandem, 50,000 lb on a tri-axle, and 800 lb per inch of tyre width.

Off the heavy-duty network the state designates, the gross drops to 73,280 lb and the axle figures fall with it, leaving a truck on an ordinary Fulton County road 6,720 lb below the federal gross before anything else applies. Which roads carry the designation was not established, and local authorities may set lesser limits again.

A set of exemptions runs alongside it, off the interstates: highway construction and maintenance machinery, farm drainage machinery, implements of husbandry used during farming operations, firefighting equipment, and a recovery vehicle moving a disabled vehicle or combination up to 50 miles.

Ind. Code § 9-20-4-1; local limits under § 9-20-1-4 and § 9-20-7-2. Information, not legal advice.

Beyond the weight rules, the paperwork is one sentence: we need a title unless the truck is old enough that it never had one.

Everything after that sentence is a fix rather than a category. A lost title has a counter replacement; where none exists there is a bonded route. Neither one stops a sale.

Indiana brands a vehicle salvage where repair to a roadworthy state would cost more than 70 per cent of its fair market value immediately before the damage, and the statute names semitrailers explicitly, so a trailer can carry a brand independently of the tractor. Rebuilding requires a state police officer to verify ownership of the major component parts and the source of those parts — a paperwork audit rather than a condition inspection, and a rebuild done without receipts cannot pass it.

Ind. Code § 9-22-3-3 and § 9-22-3. Information, not legal advice.

None of that narrows what we will look at. Farm trucks and grain hauls, dump trucks and aggregate haulers, day cabs and road tractors, flatbeds, rollbacks, tankers, service bodies, box trucks and straight trucks, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Box trucks and straight trucks are not a Fulton County speciality — they are everywhere. They are on the list because we buy them here too.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. The roads into the Prairie Mills gates and the farm ground the 150-mile draw reaches across are where most of it turns up.

• Does it have to run?No. It does have to be complete — if the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Rust is not a disqualifier.
• The engine is out of it. Is that different?Yes, and that is the line. A tired engine is fine; an engine that has been pulled out and sold means we can’t buy the truck.
• What about the title?We need one unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. Lost titles have a counter replacement; where none exists there’s a bonded route.
• It only works at harvest.Ordinary on a truck running into Prairie Mills, and standing is its own kind of wear rather than a mark against it. A machine that hauls hard for a few weeks and then sits is a different proposition from one that runs all year, and we read the truck rather than the hours.
• Do you actually come to Rochester?Often we don’t need to — plenty of these we buy remotely and arrange the tow, so nobody has to be at the yard, and that holds right out across the 150 miles the mill draws from. All of Fulton County either way. We come to you and drive it away, we come to you and tow it, we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, or you drive it to us.

Those answers matter because the reason for the call is usually not the truck. Retiring off the farm. A medical that went the wrong way. Ground sold or rented out. A truck standing beside a bin since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Across the Fulton County ground that trucks into Prairie Mills, and out through the 150 miles beyond it, there is usually one waiting.

Most of those aren’t happy reasons, and we don’t treat them like they are. Somebody wants a straight answer and the truck gone. That’s what we’re here for.