Central Ohio egg farm addresses traffic issues
8/26/2014JOHNSTOWN, Ohio — Trillium Farms has applied to the Ohio Department of Agriculture to add 2 million chickens to its egg farm.
When Trillium notified the Licking County commissioners and Hartford Township trustees about its plans to make the additions to empty barns on Croton Road, residents spoke up.
According to the permit application, the new site would bring about 150 trucks weekly, transporting eggs, feed, and manure.
The problem, however, was about 1.5 miles up the road, where Trillium’s six silos store the grain to feed all those hens.
Each fall, during the harvest season, dozens of trucks arrive daily at the site, which is at the intersection of Croton and Benner roads, to replenish the supply of feed corn, about 2 million bushels, most of which comes from Ohio farmers.
“When I went up there, I couldn’t believe how bad it was,” County Engineer Bill Lozier said.
“There were trucks everywhere, waiting to pull in, get weighed, dump their load, and get weighed again. And the ones waiting to get in were staged up and down the public roads not designed to handle that kind of truck traffic.”
When the local traffic concerns were presented to Trillium, the egg farm began working with the engineer to solve the problem.
The solution, presented to Licking County’s commissioners on Tuesday, includes widening Benner Road to include a 6-foot-wide truck lane and adding a second scale and a gravel loop on Trillium’s property to create a more efficient in-and-out for grain delivery — all at Trillium’s expense.
“The key is that the queues for loading and unloading and weighing are now stored on Trillium’s property rather than the public roads,” Mr. Lozier said. “I’ve really been encouraged by Trillium’s cooperation.”