Increasing hauling volume
The Chevy S-10 truck can hold
20 five gallon buckets of horse manure.
I'm thinking of attaching a 5
inch board on each side to increase capacity to 40.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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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.