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Request a DemoFood insecurity in Georgia is huge, and a Senate bill hopes to bring parties together to figure out how to fix it
- Georgia is rife with food deserts. About 22% of the state’s 10.9 million residents live in an urban area that is more than one mile from a grocery store, or in a rural area more than 10 miles from a grocery store.
- There are concerns that rural areas are an afterthought for 'legislators, agencies and funders' regarding food security.
- SB 177, the Food Insecurity Eradication Act, will look at improving access to healthy foods and ending food deserts across the state.
A two-year effort to tackle food insecurity in Georgia may be coming to fruition. The General Assembly is now moving on SB 177, a bill to create a Food Security Advisory Council that would find ways to get more healthy food to economically disadvantaged people in underserved areas.
It began in early 2021, when Sen. Harold Jones II, D-Augusta, spurred by the closing of grocery stores in low-income areas of his district, pushed through legislation to set up a Senate study committee to look at improving access to healthy foods and ending food deserts across the state. As chair, he convened several meetings that fall, featuring major players in the food sector, including farmers, food bank execs, economic development experts and leaders of state and federal agencies that provide food and nutrition education to children, seniors and needy families.
“I thought that I could fix it, that we could do a bill on tax credits for grocery stores, and they’ll come running,” Jones told State Affairs. “And maybe we could do a deal with farmers’ markets to get more fresh food to places that don’t have it.”
What he learned was that the issues and market forces that make getting good, healthy food to the Georgians who most need it are “complex and layered.” For one thing, he said, he and other legislators “didn’t really understand the difference between food deserts and food insecurity, which you really have to get a grip on to have the kind of impact we hope to have.”
Food deserts, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), are areas where people have limited access to a variety of healthy and affordable food. Food insecurity is the consistent lack of food to have a healthy life because of your economic situation, driven by poverty, lack of affordable housing and chronic health conditions, among other factors.
“They’re integrally related, of course, but we have to grapple with both circumstances in order to make progress,” said Jones. “And what we’ve learned from the study committee is that we need to bring together all the experts and stakeholders who constantly deal with these issues, who don’t always agree with one another, and let them kind of work through it, and come up with solutions. And then we need to get some serious state buy-in on legislation, including funding, to solve these problems.”
Where’s the bread?
Georgia is rife with food deserts. About 22% of the state’s 10.9 million residents either live in urban areas that are more than one mile from a grocery store, or in rural areas more than 10 miles from a grocery store. And poverty factors heavily in the lack of food access. Alana Rhone of the USDA’s economic research department told legislators that Georgia has the sixth-highest share of low-income areas in the country where people also lack adequate access to groceries. More than 2 million people in Georgia, including 500,000 children, live in these low-income and low-access areas, located in both urban and rural areas across the state.
Food insecurity and consumption of nutrition-poor food, such as high-salt, high-fat foods, cost Georgia $1.78 billion in additional health care costs each year and increase the risk for a number of chronic health conditions, including high blood pressure, diabetes, kidney disease, osteoporosis, obesity and cancer, according to Joy Goetz, an expert with the Georgia Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.
Last week, when SB 177, the Food Insecurity Eradication Act, was discussed during the Senate Agriculture and Consumer Affairs Committee meeting, some of the strain among the various public and private entities whose leaders are likely to be appointed to the 15-member council to be created by the bill was apparent.
Jones discussed the need for the council to take up regulatory reform at some state agencies, including the Georgia WIC (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program Women, Infants, and Children) program within the state Department of Public Health (DPH), which provides healthy food, baby formula and nutrition education to 185,000 participants each month. He said some grocery store operators reported that they were stymied in their efforts to open new stores in underserved areas due to stringent regulations and red tape that made them wait from a few months to a year to get a WIC license.
His observations were reinforced by Kathy Kuzava, president of the Georgia Food Industry Association, who said the profit margin of grocery stores and supermarkets is typically below 2% and that many store owners can’t afford to wait for months and miss out on revenue from WIC-related sales. She said the state WIC program’s policy of only issuing licenses at certain times of the year, and not issuing licenses to grocers until they’ve held a SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as Food Stamps] license for one year, were particularly burdensome.
Kuzava told State Affairs that “both SNAP and WIC are absolutely vital components to running a successful grocery store, particularly in regions where customers are low income. … If you’re trying to attract business, you want to be able to take care of 100% of your customers from day one. So if their customers have to shop somewhere else to use the benefits, they’re not going to get that store up and running like it should be.”
DPH Communications Director Nancy Nydam told State Affairs this week that “WIC no longer has a policy that requires grocery stores to have held a SNAP permit for at least one year or previous grocery industry experience for one year.” She said the current requirement “is in line with federal regulations that require the existence of a SNAP permit in good standing with the USDA Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) in order to be authorized as a Georgia WIC grocer.”
Tension between dollar stores and full-service grocery stores also emerged during the study committee sessions, and surfaced at the Senate Agriculture Committee hearing last week.
Tom Coogle, president of Reynolds Foodliner, which operates Piggly Wiggly grocery stores in many rural and low-income areas of Georgia, told legislators in 2021 that a “huge number of dollar stores opening up” was a threat to independent grocers who “are trying to draw from a larger footprint” in underserved areas, and that dollar stores offering milk and other food products cut into their business, which operates on a thin 1.75% profit margin.
Grocery store operators and economic development and nutrition experts continue to voice their concerns about the economic and health problems that dollar stores present. DeKalb County has maintained a moratorium on new dollar stores since 2019 in an effort to encourage grocery stores and supermarkets offering fresher, healthier foods to set up shop.
“There are only so many people in a small community,” said Kuzava. “And all those people want a large grocery store. But a community has to have enough business to support a large store. And grocers come in and do an assessment to see if there’s enough volume there. If there are too many stores close by selling food, whether it’s a dollar store or a drug store — because everybody’s in the food business now — a grocer doesn’t go into that area.”
Rurals outside Atlanta left to fend for themselves
Meanwhile, Deidre Grim, executive director of Forsyth Farmers’ Market in Savannah, said she is concerned that rural areas in general are an afterthought for “legislators, agencies and funders who are addressing nutrition security. It doesn’t trickle down to the coast like it needs to. It doesn’t go very far past Atlanta.”
Grim noted that their business provides a robust market for local farmers, generating $1.2 million in annual sales last year, including about $74,000 of food offered at half-price to SNAP customers. And while their mobile food truck serving hundreds of elderly and low-income residents in Chatham County currently receives $125,000 a year in federal USDA grant funding, “we don’t get a dime from the state.”
“We have a ton of agencies, organizations and nonprofits working tirelessly to make sure that Georgians have healthy food in their bellies, but due to a lack of coordination, we’re leaving a lot of money on the table,” said Dr. Amy Sharma, executive director of Science for Georgia, a nonprofit advocating for the responsible use of science in public policy, who spoke in support of the bill in a Senate committee last week.
“We have gaps in some places, overreach in others … How do we support our Georgia Grown farmers in getting food to people? How do we get people the funds to buy food? How do we educate people on what they want to eat? If they see a vegetable they’ve never seen before, it might be delicious, but let’s give them info on how to cook it. This bill addresses all these things.”
Danah Craft, the executive director of Feeding Georgia, part of a statewide network that includes eight regional community food banks, said she is hopeful the food security council can leverage the expertise on hand to come up with creative solutions to address food insecurity.
Demand at Feeding Georgia’s food banks is 20% above pre-pandemic levels, she said, “a function of the high inflation, food and fuel prices that people are experiencing right now that are really squeezing low-income families.” The organization’s food banks and more than 2,000 partner pantries distributed 127 million meals to food-insecure Georgians in 2019, 171 million meals in 2020 during the height of the pandemic emergency, and 161 million meals in 2022.
Craft said food banks are trying to help Georgia farmers, who last year donated more than 30 million pounds of fresh “ugly produce,” or misshapen fruits and vegetables not aesthetically pleasing enough for the retail market, to move their goods to local food pantries, mobile food trucks and other partner venues where people in need of fresh and free food can get it.
“There’s a lot of surplus food, and the issue is always that people are in one place and the food is in another. And how to move it quickly and safely into communities where it’s needed has always been the puzzle and the logistics challenge that food banks have placed themselves in the center of,” she said.
Craft said she hopes the state food security council, if it’s greenlighted, will look at promising state and federal programs that could be replicated and expanded. That includes a federal Farm to Food Bank program that currently provides a grant to states covering half the cost of packing and transporting food, which food banks have to match. The Georgia Department of Human Services recently won a $164,000 grant for that program, as well as federal funds from the American Rescue Plan Act that will pay for “last mile” distribution of fresh and perishable food, providing infrastructure like refrigerated coolers to food pantries, to keep food from spoiling before it can be delivered.
Craft credits Gov. Brian Kemp for putting $800,000 in the fiscal year 2023 and 2024 budgets to support the state’s Farm to Food Bank program, which provides funds for food banks to buy surplus food from Georgia farmers. The program has allowed food banks to offer premium produce to clients that normally isn’t donated, such as citrus, sweet corn and collard greens.
“If we can get the state and private entities to invest more in building out the capacity of our food network in areas that are hard to reach, that would be a great outcome,” Craft said.
Jones said he’s also interested to see if the council can come up with innovative ideas to transport food. He said a short-lived program that rideshare service Lyft offered in Atlanta in 2019 to take food insecure people to and from grocery stores for $2 per trip “caught my eye. That didn’t pan out, but I’d love for the council to look at it again.” (Doordash, it turns out, is now partnering with the Atlanta Community Food Bank to deliver food to local pantries and other community partners).
“The strategy behind the council is to bring together all these people and entities, public and private, that are active within different spaces in food insecurity, and to get these experts talking to each other, and drafting legislation,” said Jones. “They’ll also help us to direct funding, to make sure it’s going to the right places. And then we as a state government will have to step up and buy into what they propose to fix these issues.”
SB 177, the Food Insecurity Eradication Act, passed unanimously out of the House Agriculture and Consumer Affairs Committee on Tuesday, and awaits action in the House Rules Committee.
If the bill passes before Sine Die, the last day of the legislative session on March 29, and is signed by Kemp, the Georgia Food Security Advisory Council will be created within the Department of Agriculture and the governor, lieutenant governor and speaker of the House will be charged with appointing its 15 members.
Have questions, comments or tips about food insecurity or food access in Georgia? Contact Jill Jordan Sieder on @journalistjill or at [email protected].
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Header image: Georgians experiencing food insecurity are seeking out free food from food banks at rates 20% higher than before the COVID-19 pandemic. (Credit: Feeding America)
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Kemp signs a bevy of bills on elections, public safety and workforce development
The Gist
Gov. Brian Kemp on Tuesday ended a six-week whirlwind statewide bill-signing tour that enacted hundreds of new laws governing agriculture, families, elections, public safety and workforce development.
He also vetoed a dozen bills — including those dealing with homestead exemptions and easing eligibility for the HOPE Scholarship for former foster youths — during that time.
What’s Happening
All told, Kemp signed 709 bills into law in the 40 days since the 2024 legislative session ended in the early hours of March 29. The most crucial piece of legislation, by far, was the $36.1 billion fiscal year 2025 state budget, which included 12 disregards. A disregard is when a state agency is directed not to spend the money allocated for a specific item.
“He didn’t have any real disregards. The majority of these are clarifications,” Kemp spokesman Garrison Douglas said of the governor. “Agencies were given more specific instructions on how to spend the money.”
Bills impacting education, health care, military members, human trafficking and Georgia’s coastal communities were among those Kemp signed in the month following the session’s end. Other notable legislation:
- Police and property owners now have more tools to remove squatters, people who have illegally taken over a private home or property.
- Homeowners associations are now required to notify homeowners in writing of a covenant breach and give them time to fix it before the HOAs take legal action.
- Families of students in low-performing school districts may now receive scholarships, commonly referred to as vouchers, of $6,500 per child to be used for private school tuition or homeschooling expenses.
Additional legislation the governor signed over the last two weeks includes:
Agriculture
- Kemp signed a package of bills meant to provide further protection for the state’s No. 1 industry. The new laws are intended to ban “adversarial” countries from owning Georgia farmland, ease high input costs for farmers, protect children from misleading and dangerous marketing, and hike penalties for livestock theft.
Children & Families
- Senate Bill 376 improves timely permanent placement of a child removed from his or her home by the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services.
- Senate Bill 387 provides free state identification cards for children between the ages of 14 and 17 who are in the custody of the Division of Family and Children Services.
Elections
Any Georgia resident can now challenge another resident’s voter eligibility under a new law the governor signed in April, setting up probable cause to have voters removed from the rolls, critics say. Senate Bill 189 also allows a presidential candidate from any political party to be on the ballot as long as that person qualifies in at least 20 other states. It’s one in a package of election-related bills that critics say could impact the outcome of the 2024 and other future elections.
- House Bill 974 gives the public online access to photos of ballots cast in elections on the Georgia Secretary of State’s website, requires watermarks on ballots and uses technology to verify the text on ballots cast. The bill also requires a percentage of ballots in select statewide elections to be audited.
- House Bill 1207 gives election supervisors the flexibility to change the number of voting booths in precincts.
Public Safety
- House Bill 1105, the Georgia Criminal Alien Track and Report Act, creates a new immigration law that requires law enforcement to determine the nationality and immigration status of people they detain and requires the Department of Corrections and sheriffs to notify federal authorities when they have undocumented immigrants in their custody. Failure to enforce the law could cause local governments to lose state and federal funds, and law enforcement officers and government officials could face misdemeanor charges.
- Senate Bill 63 adds 30 more criminal charges to those requiring cash bail for release, including 18 misdemeanors, such as criminal trespass, forgery and failure to appear. The bill also limits what charitable organizations can do to provide bail to people in jail and establishes that individuals and organizations cannot post more than three cash bonds per year to secure a person’s release. Legal defense organizations say it unfairly limits their work and violates the rights of those accused, and they plan to sue the state to overturn the law.
- Senate Bill 465 creates a new type of offense — felony aggravated involuntary manslaughter — for selling fentanyl to someone who dies from taking the potent drug. Dealers could be prosecuted under the new law whether or not they knew the drug they sold contained fentanyl. Penalties range from a minimum of 10 years to 30 years or life imprisonment.
Workforce Development
Several bills were enacted to help students take advantage of dual enrollment and technical education programs, especially those in high-demand career fields.
- House Bill 982 directs the State Workforce Development Board to create the High-Demand Career List. Colleges, technical schools and high schools currently use conflicting lists, so this unified list will eliminate confusion among students, parents, educators and agencies about what careers are considered high-demand.
- Senate Bill 440 creates the Accelerated Career Diploma Program and simplifies the pathway for students to receive dual enrollment funding for more than 30 hours.
- Senate Bill 497 expands the apprenticeship programs in high-demand career fields and creates a pilot program for public service career apprenticeships.
The Legislature considered more than a dozen bills related to occupational licensing. Among those that passed:
- Senate Bill 354 removes the licensure requirement for beauticians who blow-dry hair, wash hair or apply makeup. The bill doesn’t include other services, such as cutting hair, applying dyes, bleaching or using chemicals, which will still require a cosmetology or esthetician license.
- Senate Bill 373, requires the Board of Marriage and Family Therapists to issue an expedited license to any individual moving from another state who has a current valid license to practice in that state and is in good standing with that state.
- Senate Bill 195 makes Georgia the third state to join the Social Work Licensure Compact. Once seven states have joined, the compact will become functional and allow social workers with valid licenses in good standing to practice in member states.
View Kemp’s 2024 signed legislation here.
Here are some of the bills Kemp vetoed:
House Bill 1231 would have expanded the Georgia Tuition Equalization Grant (TEG) Program, HOPE Scholarship and Dual Enrollment Program eligibility for certainprivate, nonprofit institutions; allowed HOPE Scholarship recipients to use unusedcredit hours to get a first professional degree; and removed the initial and first-year achievement standards of the HOPE Scholarship for former foster youths. Kemp said he vetoed the bill because none of the three proposals were accompanied by additional funding or fiscal analysis.
Senate Bill 368 would have prohibited foreign nationals from making political contributions, which is already banned by federal law. Kemp vetoed the bill at the request of the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Rick Williams, R-Milledgeville.
House Bill 1019, as originally introduced, would have doubled the statewide homestead tax exemption to $4,000 from $2,000 if voters approved it in a referendum. But on the last day of the legislative session, the Senate adopted a floor amendment to return the bill to its original form. That amendment did not change the language of the constitutionally required voter referendum, which references a $10,000 exemption. Voters would therefore be approving a different exemption, which the Legislature did not pass. Conflict between the statutory and the referendum language led Kemp to veto the bill.
See the governor’s statements on all the bills he vetoed here.
What’s Next?
Most of the new laws took effect upon signing or will take effect July 1 unless otherwise noted.
Read these related stories:
Have questions or comments? Contact Jill Jordan Sieder on X @journalistajill or at [email protected] and Tammy Joyner on X @lvjoyner or at [email protected].
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Rural communities hopeful Kemp change to state soil amendment law will curb stink
After seven years and millions of dollars in restoration, Heritage GA opened its door last month to those seeking solitude and a chance to commune with nature. But the constant presence of trucks hauling a noxious concoction of waste byproducts from poultry processing plants threatens to ruin those plans.
The historic Catholic retreat sitting on 200 acres near Sharon is meant to be an economic boon and tourist attraction for Taliaferro (pronounced “Tolliver”) County, a poor, mostly Black county of 1,600, situated 90 miles east of Atlanta.
“It’s a very historic, sacred site. Our business is being threatened by this soil amendment. It’s [the retreat] been a major financial investment in the county and in the state and it’s really helping,” Betsy Orr, chief executive officer of Purification Properties LLC, which restored the retreat — a tribute to the first Catholic settlers who arrived in Georgia in 1790.
The sludge, known as soil amendment, is being transported to a hog farm about 1.5 miles from Heritage. The former hog farm was cited by the state Environmental Protection Division after residents complained that the waste being spread on the farm had polluted a nearby creek. The property owner resolved the consent order requiring him to pay $5,000, mark the buffer area on the farm and ensure no soil amendment is applied to that area, according to EPD spokesperson Sara Lips.
The Heritage property includes a commercial building, barn, cottages, prayer spaces, walking trails and the oldest Catholic Cemetery in Georgia. Orr predicts that if the smell from the former hog farm reaches Heritage, “it’s going to wreck our business.”
On Monday, Orr breathed an inward sigh of relief when she learned that Gov. Brian Kemp signed a bill into law that could prove fortuitous for landowners and other businesses battling problems created by soil amendment.
The new law adds a provision to the state Soil Amendment Act of 1976 that stops companies from hauling or receiving soil amendment if they’ve been notified by EPD to resolve an outstanding dispute or complaint. The notification is known as a consent order. The new law is effective July 1.
“It’s good because the state and the Agriculture Department have really prevented that kind of bill from being enacted because they say that it’s to the farmer’s benefit to be able to use the soil amendments,” Orr said.
Orr’s comments are a common refrain from business owners and families with properties in rural Georgia who sit near soil amendment sites and who complain of vultures, hordes of flies and unbearable smells floating across their properties.
“The problem is a lot of the soil amendments are causing pollution. They are stinky, nasty wastewater and other products,” Orr said. “Sometimes it is not even what they are allowed to dump. Finally, they have passed this amendment, and I hope they enforce it. Some of the things that these people are dumping are … ruining the landowners around them and the state has got to start caring about that.”
Doug Abramson, a retired corporate lawyer who lives in Wilkes County where a soil amendment runoff killed 1,700 fish in the Little River July 2022, called the new law “a step in the right direction.”
“Many counties throughout the state are encountering problems with sludge, improper dumping, and [other] soil amendment issues,” said Abramson, who along with his wife Susan have been working to address the problem for about a decade. “This [new law] is at least a recognition that there are problems out there. I do think the state could do better. The Department of Agriculture could do better but it is a step in the right direction.”
Have questions? Contact Tammy Joyner on X @lvjoyner or at [email protected].
Watch live: Kemp signs $36.1B budget bill
Today is the deadline for Gov. Brian Kemp to either sign or reject bills passed by the Georgia General Assembly during this past legislative session. Arguably, the biggest of those bills is the annual budget. Kemp and first lady Marty Kemp will be joined by Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, House Speaker Jon Burns, and members …
Bill adds violation to Soil Amendment Act, but will it stop the stench?
After years of enduring intrusive, foul-smelling waste spread on untold tracts of rural land, Georgians living near such sites are finally getting some relief.
On Monday, Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law a bill that adds a new violation to the state’s 48-year-old Soil Amendment Act. Soil amendment is meant to help farmers create healthier soil.
The law’s new provision is being hailed as a small but significant breakthrough in a 15-year battle to rein in abuses and mismanagement and create more safeguards and oversight in the disbursement of soil amendment. Many rural communities have long complained that the state-approved, sludge-like substance smells like “rotting corpses,” draws flies and vultures, and has led to other environmental problems.
Soil amendment is a state-approved additive derived from waste created mostly at chicken-processing and pet food-processing plants. It’s intended to be used as fertilizer on farmland where crops are grown. It’s supposed to help reduce erosion, improve water retention, change soil pH, pump up nutrients and provide other soil-boosting enhancements. Georgia law allows chicken processing waste to be applied to land as a soil amendment. Some farmers use it as a cheap alternative due to the rising cost of fertilizer.
The new provision, which goes into effect July 1, makes it illegal for a company to continue spreading soil amendment if the company or the site in which the waste is being distributed is under some kind of enforcement action from the state Environmental Protection Division or the state Department of Agriculture, the bill’s sponsor Rep. Rob Leverett, R-Elberton, told State Affairs Monday. Violators must be notified by the agriculture department and must resolve the prior problem before they can resume dispersing more soil amendment, he added.
“I’m very excited. I appreciate the governor signing the bill,” said Leverett who lives in Elbert County where some residents have had problems with soil amendment. “The passage of the bill indicates there’s some recognition by the Legislature that we do need to take a look at this. What I’m trying to do is address what I believe to be legitimate complaints. Hopefully, we started to do that this year and we’ll take other incremental steps as needed. I look forward to the Ag department enforcing this new violation once it’s gone through their regulatory process.”
David vs Goliath
In a state where agriculture wields tremendous power — it provides paychecks for 1 in 7 Georgians and contributes about $75 billion a year to the state’s economy, most of it from poultry processors — the new legislation is a milestone, local government officials and activists say.
“It is a very big step,” Tonya Bonitatibus, executive director and riverkeeper at the environmental nonprofit Savannah Riverkeeper, told State Affairs. “This bill made it through the Senate and the House Ag committees, which are traditionally definitely not in the business of overregulating Ag, and it passed almost unanimously [in the Legislature] and that speaks volumes.” Bonitatibus has been tracking the issue for 13 years.
While state lawmakers are recognizing the harsh impact the state’s poultry industry waste is having on some rural communities, leaders in those communities are waiting to see what the Georgia Department of Agriculture does. The department has sole power to regulate soil amendment.
“I hope the new [agriculture] commissioner Tyler Harper brings us more positive results,” said Oglethorpe County Commission Chair Jay Paul, a former state Environmental Protection Division specialist who dealt with soil amendment most of his 17 years with the agency. “I’m trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.”
Shortly after taking office in January 2023, Harper vowed to review the department’s Soil Amendment Program. Since then, he has issued recommendations and is beefing up the program, which when he arrived had only two people, one of whom was the inspector for the entire state. With $550,000 in funding from the state, Harper has added two more inspectors, a program manager and an attorney.
The department is updating its software so inspection reports can be completed digitally and tracked online rather than hand-written. It’s also updating its licensing and registration software to help registrants more easily comply with soil amendment program rules.
“Our team has done a really good job,” Harper told State Affairs. “We’ve really been working to get our arms around it since I walked in the door last year, and we’ve been committed to addressing the issue and ensuring that the agricultural industry can be successful and that we’re protecting our state, our resources and the public all at the same time.”
Rep. Robert Dickey, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee said Leverett’s bill is “about the [state agriculture] department having some teeth in the rules and law to really shut down” companies with abusive soil amendment practices.
The Ag department’s recent efforts are more than what’s been done in the past, critics say, but more needs to be done.
“I really haven’t seen a whole lot of difference. I mean, we’ve heard some good rhetoric,” Wilkes County Commission Chairman Sam Moore told State Affairs.
“Unfortunately, it’s the little bitty counties against the Department of Ag. And we lose every time,” Elbert County Commission Chairman Lee Vaughn said. “The Department of Ag has 100% control over what soil amendments are and what they allow and how they allow them to be applied.”
Local leaders in counties affected by the sludge onslaught say they’ve been kept in the dark for years about soil amendment. To make matters worse, they say they have no regulatory authority to resolve the problem because that’s left up to the state agriculture department.
“We want to know where it’s going. We want to know what it is,” Moore said. “I mean, we don’t even know if they [sludge-hauling companies] have a permit or not. You call the Department of Ag and they act like they don’t know. It’s just the same old thing that’s been going on for years.”
In the last year, some counties have started fighting back, creating local ordinances that discourage the sludge haulers from coming into their communities. At the same time, the problem has sparked activism among local residents in several counties where the problem prevails.
‘Death and Diarrhea’
State Affairs spoke to local government officials, activists, environmentalists, farmers and residents in a half dozen counties where soil amendment has been applied for years. Their stories all seem to align.
They talked about how their communities have been overrun with tractor-trailers hauling millions of gallons of sludge — or as locals call it “chicken blood and guts” — presumably from chicken and dog-food processing plants. The additive is being spread on open land in rural communities — usually small, sparsely-populated counties — across Georgia, with little state regulation, scrutiny or intervention.
The companies bringing in the waste have contracted with or paid farmers or landowners to apply it on their property. Some locals report seeing dozens of tanker-trucks a day hauling the waste into their communities. It’s an endless procession where the sludge is applied throughout the day, all hours of the night and even in the rain.
The usual hoot owls and honey bees have been replaced by vultures and flies, community members say. Millions of flies land on farm animals and get entangled in children’s hair when they play outdoors. In Hancock County, locals have resorted to firing shotguns in the air to scare away the vultures perched atop churches and other buildings. The vultures feast on the land where the soil amendment has been deposited.
“Buzzards or vultures, whatever you want to refer to them as, eat dead rotting flesh,” said Angela Walden who lives in Jefferson County, 45 minutes south of Augusta.
Dirt roads have become muddy, well-worn crevices as dozens of tanker trucks haul tons and of the liquid ooze into communities nonstop.
In most instances, the sludge is spread on top of the soil, locals and officials say, instead of injected into the ground, as the state requires, creating a horrific stench that stretches for miles.
“It smells like death and diarrhea,” said Patrick Dragos, a former Seattle ironworker who moved his wife and daughter to Jewell in August 2022. The family owns an historic wedding venue on a 42-acre estate with an 1895 Victorian home and barn near the Ogeechee River.
Dragos was so incensed after getting nowhere with state and local officials and the sludge-hauling companies that he is now running for chairman of Hancock County Board of Commissioners. The 34-year-old Republican is running against three Democrats, including the incumbent Helen “Sistie” Hudson who has held the seat since 2016.
“If they’re not going to handle our issues and take this seriously, I guess I’m going to have to do it myself,”Dragos said.
Problems began near the Dragos family’s Hancock County property in March 2023 when soil amendment was applied to a farm about a mile away. The smell and flies continued through October, leading Dragos to believe the problem was over. Then, the sludge-filled trucks returned in March of this year and have shown up frequently since then.
The family’s heading into a busy season of weddings, graduations and baby showers and never know when the trucks and smell will show up.
“The threat of the smell and flies is constant. So that stress is always there,” Dragos told State Affairs.
Dragos worries that nonstop application of the soil amendment may eventually seep into the water tables and eventually his well water.
It’s already created one environmental mishap.
In July 2022, some 1,700 fish died in the Little River in Wilkes County after soil amendment runoff from Mar-Leta Farms leached into the river, a Georgia Environmental Protection Division report found. The waste came from washdown water at a Hartwell County Nestle Purina facility provided by a company called Proponic Solutions, according to the EPD report. The report described the waste as “grey, turpid wastewater.” Mar-Leta, also known as McAvoy Farms, was later fined $85,000.
“It’s a major environmental concern,” said Paul, the Oglethorpe County Commission chairman. “And I’m not convinced that the fish kill in Wilkes County will be the last one because nobody really knows what’s in it. It’s just that simple. It comes as wastewater and suddenly goes on a truck and it becomes soil amendment.”
Fighting Back
Unable to get much help from the state agriculture department for years, some counties have taken steps to deal with the problem themselves:
In Warren County, companies wanting to apply soil amendment have to notify the county and get a permit to do so, Commission Chairman John Graham said. The companies also are limited to storing the sludge in certain industrial areas of the county and onsite for no more than 12 hours.
The ordinance was put in place about a year ago so that county officials “ would have more knowledge of what’s going on,” Graham said. “We’re going to stand on our ordinance. Our attorney put it together and he said he followed everything [based on the law]. He feels like we did the right thing.”
The issue had become such a problem that the county was forced to close one dirt road because “they had brought so many tanker-trucks of that stuff in, it messed up the dirt road. With all the rain we’ve had and them bringing in 20 trucks a day and that weight on a muddy dirt road just ruined it,” Graham said, adding that activity has “slowed down in the last little while,” Graham added.
Oglethorpe County created an ordinance last June that requires companies applying soil amendment on a tract of land to be at least 100 feet away from the property line of the nearest private property. During the 2021-22 legislative session, Senate Bill 260, sponsored by then-Sen. Tyler Harper, limited local buffers and setbacks to 100 feet.
“If we get a complaint, we will at least go out there and walk the perimeter of a property and make sure they’re not within 100 feet,” Paul said. “If we see something more egregious, like septage [human waste] for example, we can turn it over to the George Environmental Protection Division. It [Oglethorpe’s ordinance] does give us something new but that’s about it.”
Probably the strongest local government push back comes from Wilkes County. Two months ago, county leaders adopted an ordinance that requires landowners to prove they’re using the land where soil amendment is being applied to grow products, not just as a dumping ground. One soil amendment-application company sued the county two weeks ago saying the ordinance is illegal.
“Who knows what’s going to happen,” Moore, the Wilkes County Commission chairman, said when asked about the county’s chances of winning. “You would think we’d have a good chance. [But] We’ve been dealing with the state for so long, our expectations are not real high.”
Accidental Activists
The ongoing sludge fight has also created a motley mix of NIMBY activists.
Angela Walden and her husband had plans to build their dream home on their family’s nearly 200-year-old farm in Jefferson County. Those plans died on July 13, 2022 when they got the first whiff of a mysterious sludge that had been spread on her cousin’s farm across the two-lane highway dividing their properties.
A month later, Walden’s husband, who often tended the family farm after working his day job, got sick. He was vomiting. He had a sore throat, watery eyes and headaches. He was ultimately diagnosed with thyroiditis, a condition that occurs after coming in contact with hazardous toxins. That was the beginning of the Summer of Hell — 69 days of stomach-churning stench and flies — for Walden and her family.
It was also Walden’s swift induction into activism that would take her to the state Capitol to fight against the substance that ultimately caused a family rift that continues to this day.
“It’s small town, rural Georgians up against big industry,” said Walden, who has appeared in a Rural Georgia Protection Alliance documentary about soil amendment. “The chicken industry is big in our state. You’re going up against them, these lobbyists who have millions of dollars and big time attorneys. And you have the politicians. If I can just inform my county, my residents about what this really is and to try to keep it out of my community … that’s the best way to combat it.”
Walden wants to see regulatory authority over soil amendment removed from the state agriculture department and returned to the state’s Environmental Protection Division.
“That would be a huge win,” she said. “You know, we have to do what we can to try to bring some regulation and some oversight to what they’re doing.”
Have questions? Contact Tammy Joyner on X @lvjoyner or at [email protected].