House ad committee advances buffer, unloading rules for soil amendments in HB 11 82

A Georgia House ad committee on Day 17 approved HB 11 82, a bill that sets a 100-foot minimum storage buffer for soil amendment materials and bars unloading from public roads. The committee approved the measure by voice vote.

The sponsor (unnamed in the transcript) told the panel the change is a modest alignment with existing buffers and is intended to reduce complaints from neighbors while preserving the state’s soil amendment program administered by the Department of Agriculture. "We must store it at least a 100 feet from the property line, and we cannot unload from a public road," the sponsor said.

Industry witnesses urged the committee to weigh operational impacts. Mike Giles, president of the Georgia Poultry Federation, said the material is a byproduct of processing and is valuable to farmers but that moving mandatory loading/unloading farther into fields could be impractical for large tanker and tractor-trailer vehicles. "Georgia's the leading poultry producing state in the nation," Giles said, arguing that overly prescriptive loading rules could reduce available land for spreading the material and push some landowners to use commercial fertilizer instead.

Committee members and the sponsor discussed enforcement and application methods; witnesses described current Department of Agriculture practices including subsurface incorporation (described in testimony as "knifed in") to reduce odor. The sponsor and other members emphasized that the rule applies statewide and that the Department of Agriculture already has compliance teams to investigate complaints.

Representative Leverett moved to advance the bill; a second was recorded and the chair called for a voice vote. The chair announced that the bill passed the committee. The transcript records the passage by voice vote but no recorded roll-call tally.

The committee then moved on to a hearing on HB 9 47; no further action on HB 11 82 was recorded in the transcript.