You haven't been to the land of sugar I take it.

RSM. They do right by us.

lol No.

I grew up on a small 5 generation farm, cattle, corn, soybeans, an orchard, tobacco when I was in school.

Parents are down to just the orchard and soybeans now with hay as a for sale item instead of for cows now, sold the last of them last year.

They break even or make little each year, take no assistance from the government what so ever. My dad hasn't had a day off his entire adult life minus the few times he was injured seriously.

I know two couples my age that "farm" and work real jobs, they have brand new vehicles, dirt bikes, and tractors. I just shake my head and go back to helping my parents.

Real farming is a life, not a job. I have no clue how it works out west with huge fields, but here its back breaking!

not really when you got the land.

I hunt it myself. Most of the reason I bought it, well and the fact I needed somewhere to live.

Why an individual does what they do is one thing. What’s desirable economy wide is another.

If the democrats gave black people a bump to a personal deduction of $50,000 as reparations would you be happy for them for paying less?

Farmers around here have a saying about this topic........"Don't hate da' playa', hate da' game!"

my dad and a biz partner used to have 500 head of cattle.

they worked 7 & 7 and used to work them on each weeks off.

We are in deeeeeeeeep south LA, all the water we need and never hardly ever have a freeze. plenty of winter grass, normal grass, and they plenty of hay stacked away. basically costs very little down here to be a cattle man if you have the property all ready.

I think you can raise a head of cattle on 1 acre down here.

What the fuck are you talking about .... romanticizing what exactly .... my fucking neighbors that I see and interact with all the time ? fucking smartass

Lumber lease.

Never said there aren't rich "farmers" out there .... very rich I'd imagine some of them are.  Hell look at our governor

But some of the talk in this thread is lumping all "farmers" together and I personally live amongst several actual working small farms and they are far from rich. There are still plenty of good "honest" farmers out there

colleague buys 30 acres west of DFW
holy shit taxes!!!
buys 1 pig and 1 cow
hey! I'm in the junior farmer program
hey! low taxes

This

I lease my land for the tax breaks and the farmer pays my property tax.

Even bushhogs the place twice a year.

This thread is retarded.  I couldn’t give a shit less if a farmer can write off his equipment to offset his profits.  Also if this is a form of welfare, it’s one of the most honest ways of welfare I can think of.  You wanna know why, because at the end of the day, the farmer is literally growing the food you fat asses eat!

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you!  JFC.

Yeah, it does. The only way you are classified as a farmer is if you show actual farming income, not just cash rent, or owning the land.  Share cropping does count.

Taxes are theft and increasingly funding sin, the destruction of the family, freedom and the western way of life.

you can also start a home based gunsmithing business, obtain 07/02 FFL/SOT, buy/sell/transfer guns/silencers (they literally get mailed to your house and you fill out paperwork), make machine guns, and write off expenses to offset your regular full time job.

Ah, the spirit of Christmas!

Doesn't every farm need an indoor go-cart track and a SxS for each member of the family?

TX will give you sales tax exemption on certain goods, but you have to show active agricultural business efforts such as income from selling agricultural goods. Leasing your land or declaring it a wildlife sanctuary will get the county to reduce their ask, but that’s it.

Guess you’d better tell all those landowners in Texas that they have to pay back the value of the ag exemption they got on the land they leased to farmers.

I don’t generally thank people for doing their jobs. That’s what commerce is for.

Farming is a business like any other, gotta spend money to make money. They take advantage of whatever tax breaks are available and I don’t blame them.
Also like any other business, some are doing exceedingly well and some are barely getting by. There’s also a big difference in how different farms/crops work in different areas. A farmer growing peanuts and cotton in Georgia is nothing like a farmer growing soybeans and corn in Iowa that’s nothing like a farmer growing broccoli and lettuce in California.

You are talking property taxes, and I'm talking income taxes which is what this thread is about.

This is about “income and tax reduction schemes” of which the ag exemption is one.

Also the value of farmland as an investment is driven by crop insurance and subsidies. That’s why farmers have to rent it now—it’s worth more than the value of the crops.

What do you do for a living?  Merely owning farmland does not qualify you for any type of federal ag tax benefit, period. No matter how you want to spin it.  Your second statement is a gross oversimplification as well, but I don't have time to argue.

OP just wants to fund a gubbmint healthcare scheme…he’s always lookin to angle…

What’s missing is the salary expense for the owner who is also the CEO and pays themself hundreds of thousand of $$$.  The business shows a net loss but the owner makes their money from the salary.  Even if the business is an LLC, they still need to pay themself a salary over a certain income limit.

I don't think there are many true hobby farms - at most there is land that is leased at a low enough price that the owner can just pay real estate taxes.  Hobby ranches are a real thing.  That said, they are not necessarily a bad thing either.  Ranching can be approached in different manners.  You can load your land so that it requires minimal supplemental feed, you can load it so that you can grow your own supplemental feed, you can load it to it's carrying capacity during the spring flush, or you can have a fucking feedlot and provide year round supplemental feed.  None are necessarily wrong answers - they just take different paths to labor and risk.  

Add to that, you can change your load year to year, or gradually change it (by restocking off your own raised breeding stock).  I am probably a bad offender.  I need to get a pen rebuilt, and have waited 9 months on equipment due to covid.  I am going to take a fairly large hit because I have calves that are past peak market age.  I really need to get the fucking pen built or I will be feeding them a second winter.  That said, my misery has artificially increased my animal load to what the county expects it to be (which is a load that will require more supplemental feeding that I would prefer.  Not only am I loosing money on the sale of the calves, but I will spend several thousand more on hay this winter if I don't get rid of those calves soon.  Hell the extra draw on my cows might even fuck with my annual calf crop.  Thank you covid.
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for what it's worth, the IRS is not always that hard and fast on the 3 of 5 year rule on ranches.  The ranch can also be an investment in land.  As a unified approach, it can be argued that when it is sold it will turn a net profit so the 3 of 5 year rule does not necessarily apply.  From the unified approach theory, even though my beef cattle have lost money for the last 5 years, I am over 1/2m in the black due to other land related income.  The primary reason the beef operation is in the red is investments in fence and ranch equipment.  The better part of 100k in fence, 175k in heavy equipment, plus a ranch truck will do that.


I am not sure if loosing your ag exemption at the local level is a death blow or not to the IRS.  But it is a death blow to land ownership.  It would probably add an extra 50k a year of property tax to me if I lost it, maybe more.  The counties here are hurting for money, so they are going after the exemptions pretty hard.  If I wanted to have a low labor/feed cost, I would need to run about 1 cow per 15 acres.  County requires 1 to 10.

If it's that simple go plant a few pumpkins and get that free King Ranch.

I have 32 acres that was a family farm. Yes, Obi Farmer Kenobi, teach us your ways.

I manage construction. Why are we only talking about federal taxes now?if you’re smart you try to save on both.

Of course it’s an oversimplification. But it’s not wrong.

First farm benefit in Texas is the ag value exemption.  That said, you can get that with wildlife land as well.  The most important is getting some ag/wildlife property tax value.

The main IRS benefit - if I dare to say this, is that a portion of your expenses that might have not otherwise have been deductible can become deductible.  So imagine you inherited a ranch.  It is 100 miles from the city you work in.  You could go there every weekend to simply enjoy the pleasure of nature.  But if it is a working ranch, you can probably get away with deducting mileage for your drive.  Now that is not a huge deduction, but it would be a little over $5k a year.  So, depending on your income bracket, you might save $1k in taxes a year.  Now add to that you decide that having a tractor will help you simply enjoy the pleasure of nature.  No deduction if you are just landscaping your backyard, but if you are using it to put up fence and feed cattle - that tractor becomes deductible.  Now spending money to save taxes is not a good plan, but if you were going to spend the money anyway, saving 20-30% of that money is better than a sharp stick in the eye.  Now you really don't want your fancy new tractor sitting in the rain, so you build a shed for it...  Oh, the cattle need water - that well repair is now deductible.  A pond would help water the cattle to, so now you are deducting your bass pond (abet over a period of years due to depreciation).  Getting that fence line cleared is important for the life of the fence (abet it did just also give you a 400 yard rifle range).   Well walking around the property is a chore, so I guess you really need that UTV to tend the cattle while you are there (plus drive to your deer stand).  Damn, you don't need a hunting lease anymore either for that matter.  Plus you know that calf that died last year due to a fire (aka BBQ), well it was not sold so it is really hard for the IRS to determine that it was personal consumption.

So at the end of the day, even though the ranch only broke even, you did manage to improve your quality of life with minimal personal outlay.  The IRS would love to tax that increase in quality of life, but it is really difficult to put a $ amount to.  Hell even if the ranch looses money and there is personal outlay of cash - at least some of that is returned at the end of the year due to a decrease in your income tax expense.
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Now all of this is simply playing with IRS code.  It does not get into any programs that you might be eligible for that would actually be free money.  Take that bass pond - you might also be able to get a grant for erosion control to pay for it.  I have never really worked hard to look into them - but occasionally when you get fucked by nature (crop loss), there is federal aid to keep the operation going.  In the end, the Goverment has not really come down hard on it, because if you are actually selling livestock - you are helping everyone else by keeping the price of the commodity down.
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Now it is not always roses.  Now that you have that ranch, your wife wants to get into horses.  IRS might understand your cattle expenses, but they recognize that a gelding your wife rides is really not a ranch expense.  Neither is the feed it eats, or perhaps the horse trailer to take it to shows.  If you had not started down the cow path, you could have saved a shitload of horse money.

For those of you who wonder why the Republican Party talks about small government but spends like Democrats, look at the post above mine.

Sorry, I was a CPA for about 25 years, mostly tax work.  Just saying what happens.  I did not do a lot of returns of what most would consider traditional ranchers.  I did returns of people who made a lot of money outside of ranching and happened to operate "ranches" as a weekend business (LOL).  

I really did not get into the big abuses I saw.  I saw one client deduct about $200k a year on his "ranch".  Yet he never sold a crop or calf.  That did get him audited, but he managed to make it through without getting spanked (not going to say how, it was original and unique).  Then a few years latter he built a new "special purpose agriculture structure".  That year those could be expensed (not normal).  That was a 250k deduction in addition to his annual loss.  I did his return as instructed, taking the client's word as to what was actually built.  After I handed him his return, I asked jokingly - how many baths... He replied 3...  He fucking deducted his new house.  In all fairness, his job was somewhat unique.  His expenses were actually job related, just not ranch related.  But if he deducted them as an expense to his job, the IRS would have used an endoscope during his audit.  The IRS also probably noted he was till paying tax on about 1/2m of income from his job every year (after the ranch deduction).  


I also had a client have several m of ranch expenses over a 5ish year period.  He did have a fairly serious operation, but it was more of a lifestyle operation rather than an income generator (His wife enjoyed the lifestyle of being a Gentleman Rancher's wife).  He managed to make it through an audit as well - but only because he sold the ranch for a gain that covered all the expenses he took in the prior years.  The added bonus is he sold it when he realized it could never make a profit as it was being run.  In his case, the largest advantage turned out to be income timing.  During the 5 years, he had a lot of other ordinary income to deduct those expenses against.  When he sold the ranch, not only did he have capital gain (lower rates), but his ordinary income had significantly decreased.

I have an ag exemption.  Know what my livestock is?

This'll make your fucking head spin off....

Bees.  Yup.  good ol' honeybees.  And I work that motherfucker to every single advantage I'm ballsy enough to do.  Fuck the .GOV!

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

Most here haven’t ever been around someone who actually farms for a living, yet they will spout off about how rich and subsidized they are.

I wouldn’t call them rich. Just subsidized. Part of the goal of the subsidies is to keep the price of food low. So…not rich.

My family is two generations removed from farming though.

I am around traditional farmers and ranchers (not the type of people I did tax returns for).  Some are land rich and dirt poor, some not (leased land).  They work their asses off (generally well over 3k hrs a year), and at the end of the day can afford to live in a double wide and drive 10 year old vehicles.  They do it because it is in their blood and they have a moral obligation to contribute to the welfare of America by keeping the food flowing.  They are everyday hero's in my book.

That said, I also know some that might be doing just marginally better because they are better at marketing.  They have found every nook and cranny to get a few more dollars a month out of their business.  Those can afford to live in older modest ranch houses.  Nooks and cranny's include finding ways to market a fraction of their products directly to consumers (rather than the usual marketing to huge companies that then retail the products), or finding ways to tap into other revenue sources that can run concurrent to their agriculture (it is possible to make money boarding horses on a corner of the ranch, and selling riding access).


So yes, I know beekeepers, and ranchers who trap and sell wild hogs to game ranches - every dollar counts.

I saw the other day that ranchers were pooling their money to start slaughterhouses and market their own beef. I like this idea.

Sounds like it's anyone filing a Form F and taking farm related tax deductions, not just those who have an Ag exemption for sales or property tax.

You better hope they don't start making the red states pay for the other red one's welfare. It might be a losing proposition.

10 states with the most welfare recipients:

New Mexico (21,368 per 100k)
West Virginia (17,388 per 100k)
Louisiana (17,388 per 100k)
Mississippi (14,849 per 100k)
Alabama (14,568 per 100k)
Oklahoma (14,525 per 100k)
Illinois (14,153 per 100k)
Rhode Island (13,904 per 100k)
Pennsylvania (13,623 per 100k)
Oregon (13,617 per 100k)

Pine trees take a long time to grow before you cut them for wood or paper.

Yet when the government/fed gives blue state bankers almost free money to loan to wealthy blue state liberals to buy up assets all over the country that isn’t counted as welfare.

wow, bring back the co-ops

I raise a few sheep and chickens
Lease out a few acres of crops

The sheep and crops bring in a couple of grand + a year which I’ll pay taxes on
Only thing I use my farm tax ID for is for feed

I could jump through the hoops and probably make it a little more lucrative tax wise but just never felt it was worth my time

Exactly!!!  The government has turned taxes into benefits for friends and a means of controlling behavior of the peasants.

Is this figure accurate?

Seems low to me