But custom cutters, who spend the summer months following the wheat fields from Texas to the Dakotas, worry that an effort to increase oversight on the trucking industry would hinder their efforts to find affordable seasonable employees.

A court ruling in 2006 ordered the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to require a minimum of 76 hours of classroom training and 44 hours of field practice for anyone applying for a commercial driver's license.

The expanded training, however good for the overall trucking industry, could be disastrous to the farming industry, which relies heavily on custom cutters to get crops quickly from the field to the elevator.

Unlike the trucking industry, which draws its entire profit base from moving goods thousands of miles, custom harvest crews typically travel in frequent, yet short distances. Additionally, harvest crews work only through the summer months and often employ people only for a season or two.

Placing the same training requirements on part-time harvest crews and full-time, long-haul drivers doesn't make much sense. Trucking is an industry that needs some oversight to ensure the roads and highways are safe for everyone; custom harvesters simply don't log the miles in a year to warrant the higher standards.

Custom cutters spend most of their time in rural areas, working in a field. They move from town to town, often within a hundred miles of their last job, and they don't pose much of a risk to the bulk of motorists traveling on main roadways.

Two standards would be appropriate in this situation - one for an industry based on transportation and another for industries that don't derive their profits from shipping.

Allowing custom cutters to adhere to current CDL standards, while pushing trucking companies to follow stricter guidelines, is a reasonable solution that both protects the public and the agricultural industry.