Meet a rural rising star – this year’s Rural Transport Rising Star, Luke Cannon. He has come a long way in a few years from a livestock truck workshop, through truck driving, to handling the stressful role of organising loading and delivery for a busy livestock transport fleet like Fraser’s.
PowerTorque spoke to this year’s winner of the Rural Transport Rising Star Award, Luke Cannon, who was presented with his Award at the combined Livestock and Rural Transporters Association of Queensland conference, held in the Goods Shed, in Toowoomba Queensland.
“I’m born and bred in Warwick, Southeast Queensland, lived there my whole life,” says Luke.
“At 19 years of age, I approached the Fraser family for a job in the workshop, at Frasers Livestock Transport. I started off in there for a few months. When I got a semi license, I started just helping them out where I could, running dog trailers about. My dad was a truck driver and he was in the workshop at Frasers, at the time.
“Eventually I thought I could stay away for a couple of nights and help out, jump from truck to truck and then eventually I got my own truck and I was driving full time. The workshop was a thing of the past, and then, after a few years, I finally worked my way up and got a brand new Kenworth T 659. That’s the ultimate for me, especially when you’re in your 20s.
“Then after about eight years of driving, a job opportunity came up in the office, so I went in there. I was always pretty handy on computers and with technology. I thought I could bring a few bright ideas to the office and asked if I could have a trial. I was working on the principle, that if it didn’t work out, I’d just go back to driving, which was no dramas.”
Since then Luke has stayed in the office. He started off helping out the operations managers, where needed, now he’s the sale yards logistics manager. His job is to take all the sale yard numbers each day and put together loads, taking in the various customer locations and preferences. Then he will allocate which truck does what load, generates and sends load plans and explains to the drivers how to load the livestock to suit the different destinations.
Not only do they need to have the right number of animals on the right truck, but also they’ve got to be loaded onto it in the right order. On top of that, they need to be loaded correctly to get the right weight distribution.
“Also some of the regular customers have got to take priority.” says Luke. “You want to treat everyone as equals, but it gets very hard there at times. Yes, it’s a big puzzle every day. You sit there in the mornings and wait for the sale yard numbers to come in and you’re all calm and collected, and they just hit you with big numbers.
“Then you’ve got to put it all together in the afternoon as quick as you can, so you can tell the drivers what’s happening and get them going, to give them the information. Then at night time there’s a lot of calls and there’s a lot of planning still going on, checking weights. Plus, there’s a lot of mornings where people can’t find cattle and can’t find paperwork. It’s a very stressful and demanding job, but it’s very rewarding, at the same time.
“Your catering for drivers needs all the time. Drivers are restricted by their capabilities at times and you’ve got to allow for that. You have to think about cattle weights and who’s coming off first. It’s a very demanding job at times.”
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