Florida agricultural inspection stations

Do you have to stop?

Start with the law, because it is the one with a penalty attached. Section 570.15 makes it unlawful to pass an official agricultural inspection station without stopping and submitting the vehicle for inspection — a second-degree misdemeanor — and then exempts a list of vehicles from that duty. The exempt list is private passenger automobiles with no trailer in tow, travel trailers, camping trailers, van conversions, motor homes, and pickup trucks that are not carrying agricultural, horticultural or livestock products and that have visible access to the entire cargo area.

Read that carefully and the pickup is the conditional one. A pickup is exempt only if its bed is open to view and it is carrying nothing agricultural. The car exemption carries no such condition: in the statute, a private car with no trailer is exempt whatever is in it.

Now put the two lists next to each other. A car with houseplants in the back is a private passenger automobile with no trailer in tow, which is on the bypass list, and it is also a vehicle carrying horticultural products, which is on the must-stop list. Both lists are FDACS's own, on the same page, and they overlap on precisely the person reading this.

We are not going to resolve that for you, because the department has not. What is worth knowing is which way the disagreement runs: the statute is the more permissive of the two and FDACS's plain-English list is the stricter. If you are towing anything, or driving a rental truck or a van, there is no ambiguity at all — you stop.

If a moving company is carrying the plants, that is a truck and it stops. Separately, rule 5B-3.003 requires all commercial shipments of plants entering Florida by road to stop at a station, where they are screened for certification and the cargo can be inspected.

Where they are

Every one of them is in north Florida, because that is where the roads come in. FDACS publishes a number, a name and a town for each station and no direction of travel, so where two share a number — 9A and 9B on I-75, 16A and 16B on I-95 — it is almost certainly one for each direction, though the department never says so. Watch for the signs.

• 1 Fanning Springs · Trenton
• 2 Rock Bluff · Bell
• 3 Branford · Branford
• 4 Luraville · Live Oak
• 5 Day · Mayo
• 6A Interstate 10 · Live Oak
• 6B Interstate 10 · Live Oak
• 7 Ellaville · Live Oak
• 8 Suwannee Springs · Live Oak
• 9A Interstate 75 · White Springs
• 9B Interstate 75 · White Springs
• 10 White Springs · White Springs
• 10A White Springs 2 · White Springs
• 11 Lake City · White Springs
• 12 Baxter · Sanderson
• 13 Macclenny · Macclenny
• 14 Hilliard · Hilliard
• 15 Yulee · Yulee
• 16A Interstate 95 · Yulee
• 16B Interstate 95 · Yulee
• 17 Nobles Ferry · Jasper
• 18 Highway 2 · Hilliard
• 19 Interstate 10 West · Pensacola

A twenty-fourth is on the way: Station No. 20, on Highway 231 near the Florida/Alabama border, which FDACS lists as under expansion with its details still to come.

What happens when you pull in

The stations are run by the Office of Agricultural Law Enforcement and staffed by law enforcement officers, not clerks. They are open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and their stated main duty is to keep plant and animal pests, diseases and unsafe food out of the state.

What an officer is looking for, in FDACS's own order:

• · Agricultural products that do not comply with state and federal plant quarantine regulations.
• · Agricultural products that have not been inspected.
• · Agricultural pests.
• · Plants and animals that are carrying diseases.
• · Unsafe food products, and food products that are improperly stored.

Two of those are about paperwork rather than pests, which is the part people are least ready for. The document Florida wants on houseplants moving with a household is a certificate of inspection from the state you are leaving — rule 5B-3.003 allows non-commercial house plants that are part of a passenger's baggage or household effects into the state provided they are accompanied with one.

There is a way through if your state will not issue one. If the plants come from a state that does not offer an inspection and certification service for house plants, you have to be able to give the department a Florida address where the plants will be living, so they can follow up if they decide to. Give them enough and the plants are allowed to proceed. Worth having the address written down rather than searched for at the window.

Animals are a different set of documents at the same window. If you are bringing horses, officers ask to see a health certificate and negative Coggins test results for each one.

What they take

One thing in Florida's rules is named as contraband, and it is the one people most often have in the car without thinking about it. Bringing any citrus plant, citrus plant product or propagation into Florida from another state without a department permit is unlawful, and such material — along with anything later propagated from it — is confiscated and destroyed. The rule says plainly that no compensation is allowed for it.

That is a lemon tree in a pot on the back seat, not just a nursery pallet. If you want to try, the permit is applied for before you travel, not at the station. Citrus, every state, and Florida's citrus rule in full .

Everything else is a screening rather than a list. Nursery stock needs a valid certificate of inspection from the state of origin attached to and readily visible on each package, and sugarcane propagative parts need a special permit of their own. Beyond those, what an officer finds is judged against the quarantine regulations in force, which is why the useful preparation is knowing which of your plants are certified and where they are packed.

Florida does not publish what happens to rejected material the way California does, so we are not going to tell you whether it is turned back or surrendered. Assume the decision about a plant you may not be able to bring is one to make at home.