Why not just shovel manure into bed of truck then unload to buckets

James --- Since the manure place is pretty close, it makes sense to save labor --- shoveling once instead of twice. We do fill the whole bed the few times we go far afield for biomass, but we don't mind spending a bit more gas to save a lot of time.

Hi there, be careful. My s10 doesn't like having more than 800lbs. At about 40lbs a full bucket, 40 buckets could hurt your transmission. That was upsetting for me, even though walmart was a mile away, I couldn't haul more than 20 bags of compost at a time or else i had problems shifting gears.

I was just thinking this before I read Joh's comment. Those small trucks aren't the same as the larger ones in payload/towing. We have a full size F-150 4x4 and one yard of loam blew out a tire. Thankfully, it was close to home but it was scary. It's a lot of weight. A friend blew the engine on a small Toyota truck just by towing a small car up a hill. No doubt stupid on his part and it was our truck we leant him. What happened to your white truck (Joey's)?

Why not just stack buckets on top of the full buckets, either inside (which may tamp down the contents a little) or offset so four bottom buckets support an upper bucket. Then bungee them down. I wouldn't be worried as far as weight is concerned. Sounds like you live close to the source and composted manure has been pretty light in my experience, unless it is wet.

When I do this I use a tarp.

A sturdy canvas or poly tarp that just drapes over the sides of the bed keeps the bed clean and allows you to fill right to capacity.

When you arrive at your destination you can haul the tarp right out of the truck and dump the whole load no shovel needed. With a large tree or rock to tie off on, you can even tie the corners of the tarp and drive the truck out from underneath.

I try to get a tarp large enough to both cover the bed and then fold over the load to cover in transit. This has the benefit too of keeping enough of the tarp visible to thread ropes in the grommets or to let helpers grab a corner.

According to this, the density of manure is around 63 lb/ft³.

1 ft³ ≈ 7.5 gal, so 5×20 = 100 gallon ≈ 13.37 ft³, 63×13.37 ≈ 840 lb.

You can find the load limit of S-10 truck models here, but it seems you're at around 4/5 of the load limit already. So doubling the load doesn't seem like a good idea.

Lots of interesting comments! After thinking it over, Mark and I both agree with the vast majority of you --- we're probably already close to the load limit. If we wanted to increase our capacity, we could always hook up the trailer, but would have to install a hitch if we wanted to do more than about 10 buckets there, sounds like.

Heather --- The white truck unfortunately had to go to the crusher last year.

Mike --- A tarp sounds like a good idea if you're able to drive your truck all the way to where you want your materials. But it's still too wet to drive the truck in (very wet spring), so we'd have to shovel the manure back up to bring it to our core homestead in the ATV if we used that trick.

I've hauled ten 80lb bags of quick crete in my '91 shortbed. Those S10's are tough. I've also done a v8 conversion, much more fun.