MOULTRIE, Ga. — In a letter to the editor in Tuesday’s Moultrie Observer, Bruce Leigh expressed opposition to the Georgia Agricultural Tax Exemption — GATE — which relieves farmers of paying sales tax on certain items used for agricultural production.

As a specific example, Leigh compared what a farmer and a non-farmer would pay for a hypothetical $60,000 pickup truck. He said the farmer would pay $60,000, but the non-farmer would pay that plus $4,200 in sales tax.

On Wednesday, an official of the Colquitt County Farm Bureau said Leigh had mischaracterized the exemption. Charlotte Wingate forwarded The Observer a list of allowed exemptions and non-exempt items from the Georgia Department of Agriculture’s website, which you can download at left.

Specifically, she pointed out that vehicles for on-road use — like pickup trucks — are not exempt from sales taxes, so the farmer would pay the same as the non-farmer in Leigh’s example.

Some other vehicles are exempt, though, such as tractors, commercial lawnmowers if used to maintain areas around chicken houses or other farm structures, and ATVs and off-road vehicles used for farm work.

The GATE program was approved by the Georgia General Assembly in 2012 and took effect the following Jan. 1, according to an executive summary on the Agriculture Department’s website. It is coordinated through a partnership between the state departments of Agriculture and Revenue.

The summary says the Department of Agriculture determines whether a producer meets eligibility requirements, and if so it issues him or her a GATE certification card. That GATE card can be presented when purchasing specific items to receive the tax exemption.

Leigh’s letter made several points about high local tax rates and the exemptions that fuel them; his concern about GATE was only one of them. The letter was in response to coverage of property tax issues in a recent SunLight Project report. Colquitt County Administrator Chas Cannon also wrote a letter to the editor in response to the SunLight Project article; in his letter he mentioned both GATE and the Conservation Use Valuation Assessment, a program that reduces the property tax on agricultural land.