The Transportation Department issued a 90-day waiver for truckers hauling agricultural loads from an 11-hour limit per day behind the wheel. Nebraska Sen. Deb Fischer said the waiver will allow more time for the government to decide how to get livestock and other ag commodities to market.
The 11-hour limit, known as hours of service, was tied to a regulation issued last December for truckers to electronically track the number of hours they are on the road. The goal is highway safety. Livestock haulers told Harvest Public Media that a rigid limit on their workdays could strand cattle, hogs or poultry at the side of the road, without water or shelter. “What are we going to do with them?” asked Steve Hilker, who owns a trucking company in Dodge City, Kan.
Without the waiver, the hours-of-service rule would have come into force on Sunday. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said “live agricultural commodities, including plants and animals, would have been at risk of perishing before they reached their destination” if the 11-hour limit was enforced. “The 90-day extension is critical to give DOT additional time to issue guidance on hours-of-service and other ELD (electronic logging device) exemptions that are troubling for agriculture haulers.”
The USDA said agricultural haulers operating within 150 air miles of the source of their agriculture products or livestock do not have to comply with the hours-of-service regulation.
A fact sheet from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration on agricultural exemptions from the hours-of-service rule is available here.