Who We Serve: Farming & Food Industry

The farming and food industry relies on air freight services to move products quickly, preserve freshness, and support time-sensitive supply chains. Producers use air transport to ship perishable goods such as fruits, vegetables, seafood, dairy, and premium meats, ensuring they reach markets at peak quality and with minimal spoilage. Air freight also plays a key role in exporting high-value or seasonal products that must arrive rapidly to meet international demand. Cold-chain integrity is maintained through temperature-controlled handling from farm to market, which is especially important for refrigerated or frozen foods. Beyond perishables, the industry uses air cargo to deliver urgent ingredients, raw materials, or packaged goods to processing facilities and distributors, helping prevent production delays or retail shortages. Agriculture also depends on air transport for moving livestock, hatchlings, breeding genetics, and specialized veterinary supplies, as well as high-value seeds, fertilizers, and crop inputs that need to arrive on tight schedules. In remote or hard-to-access regions, air freight provides a lifeline by delivering essential food supplies where roads are limited or unreliable.

Additionally, when critical farming equipment breaks down during harvest or planting season, air freight or air charters can rapidly deliver replacement parts to minimize costly downtime. Overall, air freight enables the farming and food industry to maintain freshness, ensure reliability, reach distant markets, and keep agricultural operations moving efficiently.

Next Flight Out (NFO) service is an expedited shipping option where your cargo is placed on the earliest departing flight to the destination. It’s essentially a way to jump to the front of the line using existing flights. For farm and food industry shipments, you should use NFO when you have an urgent delivery that is too time-sensitive for normal shipping. For example, if a dairy operation suddenly needs a specialized part to fix a pasteurizer, or a buyer places a last-minute order for fresh produce that must arrive by tomorrow, NFO is ideal. With NFO, as soon as you hand the package to us, we find a flight leaving as soon as possible (often within a few hours) and get your package on board. This could be a passenger flight’s cargo hold or a freighter flight. The service bypasses the typical wait times – we don’t hold your shipment for the next day’s batch; it goes out immediately on whatever flight is available. You’d use NFO instead of a dedicated charter when the urgent need can still be met by commercial flights, which is often more cost-effective than chartering an entire plane. Essentially, NFO is great for small to mid-size urgent shipments. It provides near-instant dispatch and very rapid transit. AirFreight.com will also arrange final delivery once the flight lands, so the moment it touches down, a driver is there to rush it straight to your farm or facility. In summary, use NFO for emergencies or critical deadlines when you need the fastest possible air shipping but don’t necessarily require an exclusive aircraft.

Air cargo charters are often the most efficient—and sometimes the only—way to reach remote or difficult-to-access locations. Because charter aircraft can operate from small airports, regional airfields, gravel strips, and even unimproved runways, they can deliver freight directly into areas that scheduled airlines are unable to serve. In places such as rural Alaska, northern Canada, and isolated island communities, these flights routinely transport essential supplies where roads may be limited, seasonal, or entirely absent.

For remote industries like mining, oil and gas, logging, and construction, charters offer fast, direct access from major hubs to the closest available landing site, avoiding the delays and long transit times common with larger airports or slow ground and sea routes. A charter might fly building materials into an Alaskan village that would otherwise wait weeks for a barge or deliver urgent equipment to a rural U.S. jobsite with no scheduled air service nearby. In essence, air cargo charters act as a lifeline for remote regions, ensuring vital freight—including food, medical supplies, tools, and machinery—arrives quickly and reliably where traditional logistics simply can’t reach.

The main difference between standard air freight and an air charter lies in how the flight is arranged and how flexible the service is. With standard air freight, your shipment travels on a scheduled airline flight (passenger or cargo) along with other cargo. You’re essentially buying space on an existing route. This is typically more cost-effective for routine shipments and works well if your timing is a bit flexible and your cargo fits standard airline requirements. However, you are limited by the airline’s schedule and routes – your freight might have to go through a hub, or only depart at certain times of day. There may also be size and weight restrictions in standard air freight services (if it’s too large, it won’t fit on a normal flight).
An air charter, on the other hand, is hiring the entire aircraft specifically for your shipment and needs. The plane goes from your chosen origin to destination on your timetable. This offers maximum flexibility: you can often depart immediately, choose a direct route (no layovers), and carry oversized or unusual cargo that regular flights couldn’t handle. The charter can also use smaller airports closer to farms or factories, which might not be serviced by big airlines. The trade-off is cost – charters are more expensive because you’re paying for the whole aircraft operation. So, we usually recommend charters for urgent, time-critical farm shipments or for very specialized cargo that can’t wait or won’t fit standard flights. For example, if a harvester part is needed overnight and no scheduled flight aligns, a charter does it. Or if you need to ship an entire grain silo apparatus, a charter might be the only way due to size. Standard air freight is great for fast-but-not-emergency needs, like shipping a routine batch of samples or sending packaged food products to a client within a couple of days. Air charter is the go-to for emergencies and extraordinary shipments where timing is everything. AirFreight.com can help decide which is appropriate: sometimes we try standard air freight first for cost savings, and switch to charter if we realize only a dedicated plane will meet the deadline.

A variety of cargo aircraft can be used for farming and food industry shipments, depending on the size, weight, and urgency of the cargo. AirFreight.com has access to a full range of planes to match specific needs:
For smaller, urgent loads or reaching remote areas, we often use light aircraft or small turboprops. Examples include planes like the Cessna Caravan or Pilatus PC-12. These are great for quick hops and can take off from shorter runways – useful if you have a local airstrip near a farming area. They can carry a few thousand pounds, which might translate to a batch of machine parts or a few pallets of high-value produce.

For medium shipments or longer distances, there are mid-sized cargo planes and regional jets. Something like a Saab 340 cargo or an Embraer 175 can move larger volumes (10,000+ lbs) and still land at regional airports. These might be used to send, say, a larger supply of veterinary medicine or a big order of perishable goods across several states.

For very large shipments, dedicated freighter jets are employed. Common ones are the Boeing 737 Freighter for domestic routes or Boeing 767 and 777 Freighters for international routes. These can handle tens of thousands of pounds of cargo. For instance, a Boeing 767-300F could easily carry full loads of produce headed to another country or bring in heavy farm equipment. If we talk about the largest cargo planes, there are the Boeing 747-400F or even the Antonov An-124 (which is often chartered for outsize cargo). These giants can carry extremely heavy machinery or very large quantities – think of moving an entire small factory setup, or hundreds of tons of goods at once.

We also should mention that sometimes even passenger aircraft are used for cargo in the belly hold. A lot of routine air freight cargo services for smaller farm product shipments might just go on commercial flights in standard ULD containers.

In summary, the aircraft used range from small propeller planes for quick, local service to massive jumbo jets for heavy and bulk loads. AirFreight.com will choose an aircraft type based on your shipment details: urgent medical supplies to a rural clinic might go on a nimble small plane, whereas a huge lot of chilled beef going overseas might fly on a long-range wide-body freighter. Each type of aircraft has unique capabilities, and by having a broad selection, we ensure your farming or food cargo is transported in the most suitable and efficient way possible.

Yes, farm-related shipments can often be delivered on the same day by air, thanks to services like urgent air freight and charter flights. Same-day delivery is a hallmark of expedited logistics, and AirFreight.com frequently executes same-day missions for the agriculture and food sector. How this works: if you have, for example, a critical shipment that needs to go out this morning and be at its destination by this afternoon or evening, we would arrange a same day air solution. If a scheduled commercial flight aligns with that timeline, we might send it via an NFO (Next Flight Out) booking on that flight, ensuring it departs immediately.

Yes, one of the big advantages of air charter services is their ability to reach remote or hard-to-access locations that standard scheduled logistics might struggle with. Since charters can utilize a wide range of aircraft types (from small planes to helicopters), they aren’t limited to major commercial airports. They can fly into regional airfields, private airstrips, or even unpaved runways if the chosen aircraft is capable of short takeoff/landing. In the United States, for example, there are over 5,000 public-use airports, but fewer than 500 have airline service.

Absolutely. AirFreight.com’s services are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year – because emergencies don’t wait for business hours. We maintain round-the-clock operations for precisely this reason. Our coordination center is staffed every hour of the day with experienced expediters who can react immediately to an urgent request. Whether it’s 2 AM on a Sunday or during a holiday, we have personnel on duty. This means if you have an AOG at midnight, you can call us and start the shipping process without delay.