A federal fertilizer-transport waiver reaches its last scheduled operating day this week. FMCSA's relief runs through 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday, August 26, for eligible interstate movements in 36 states, making the return to ordinary hours and logging rules a dispatch event rather than a paperwork footnote.
The waiver is narrow. It covers straight or blended fertilizer moved for commercial farming, agriculture or ranching and relieves eligible drivers from the hours limits in 49 CFR 395.3 and the ELD requirement in 395.8(a)(1)(i). It does not cover placarded hazardous material. Drivers operating without an ELD must keep paper records of duty status and supporting documents for six months.
Relief did not mean unlimited driving. The waiver capped driving at 16 hours in any 24-hour period and required at least six consecutive hours in a sleeper berth, or eight consecutive hours off when no sleeper berth was available. A valid CDL, freedom from an out-of-service order and the waiver's load and state limits also remained conditions of use.
The transition rule is the item most likely to cross a dispatch shift. When a driver moves from waiver work to normal operations after 14 or more total hours in waiver operations, or in a combination of waiver and normal operations, the driver must take 10 consecutive hours off. The waiver also requires immediate access to a safe resting location and at least 10 hours off when a driver reports a need for rest.
Most other compliance duties never left. Drug and alcohol rules, CDL requirements, insurance, hazardous-material rules, vehicle size and weight limits, route restrictions and federal or state agriculture documentation still apply. A carrier also must report a qualifying crash involving a driver operating under the waiver to FMCSA within five business days. The separate agricultural-operations exception in 49 CFR 395.1(k) continues, but it has its own commodity, distance, distribution-point and state planting-or-harvest conditions; it is not an automatic continuation of this waiver.
FreightNews infers that fleets should set an internal cutoff earlier than the federal expiration when a load, return trip or driver duty period could cross Wednesday night. Dispatch should identify every driver using the waiver, preserve the paper-log trail, calculate the required transition break and reassign any follow-on work that cannot start legally after the reset. That is an operating precaution based on the published end time and transition terms, not a claim that FMCSA has extended or replaced the waiver.