Maple Lane Transport owner Luke Martin is the eldest of three brothers who are partners in a series of businesses, anchored in the Martin family history by a portable shed construction and sales business. Martin, by 2010, had grown it to where it was humming. Yet "I was getting a little bored" nonetheless, he said. "The business was running on its own."
Vacant land around his home area in Philadelphia in north-central New York, near the Canadian border, provided an opportunity. "I grew up farming," Martin said -- mostly dairy. He bought some acreage and established Maple Lane Farms, planting and harvesting hay in big square bales and necessitating some way to transport the product from his area to buyers in "Pennsylvania, mostly, and some in the New England states," he said.
Maple Lane owner Luke Martin (right) with one of his sons and a company Peterbilt.
Martin did it all in his first years trucking. "I was very involved in the trucking business, too much," he said. "It was rough getting started and with a lot of things to learn in trucking. I did all the dispatching for a couple years -- and ran the truck myself."
He still hauls when there's a need to transport hay and/or the harvest from various row crops, too, which Maple Lane Farms got into with further land purchases around 2010. Movement of their own product accounts for about 20 percent of the trucking business's work, Martin estimates, keeping some haulers busy starting in Fall and running into the Spring.
This is one of 10 Small Fleet Champ semi-finalist profiles that have been airing throughout this month.
