Property Taxes for Agriculture

From 1960 to 1995, all 50 US states adopted some form of use-value assessment (UVA) for agricultural land. UVA programs treat agricultural land preferentially for property tax purposes, basing valuations only on prospective returns from agricultural activity, even when development opportunities are lucrative or are expected to be so in the future. Although UVA programs receive little attention, the programs are vast, encompassing more than 100 million acres of land in California alone and more than 61 percent of all land in Ohio (Anderson and England 2014). Furthermore, the benefits that the programs confer can be substantial. Anderson and England note that for a number of counties in Ohio, UVA results in assessed values that are more than 80 percent below market values. In a stark example, agricultural land in Bedford, Massachusetts, is assessed at an average of $155 an acre, whereas some nonagricultural land in Bedford is assessed at more than $10,000 per acre.

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