Blanco County Beekeeping Ag Exemption

Blanco CAD looks for live hives standing on the property on January 1. Ordering bees or signing an agreement doesn't get you there, whether you run them yourself or pay someone to run them for you. The land also has to be in agricultural use at the intensity typical for the area. Blanco doesn't publish how many months of bees that takes, so ask the district first if you're placing late.

You apply on state form 50-129, the Application for 1-d-1 (Open-Space) Agricultural Use Appraisal. Along with the form, the guidelines ask for a few more things on a beekeeping parcel, and the landscape plan is the biggest. It's a drawing of the property showing where the hives sit and what grows around them to feed the bees, with a map attached. Blanco CAD names fruit trees, shrubs, vines, flowers, clover, buckwheat, and vetch as the forage it wants accounted for, and asks the plan to note any future planting.

A Blanco County place usually already grows most of the forage bees need. Spring wildflowers come first, and where there's mesquite in the pastures it puts up a flow into early summer. Horsemint can come on strong through early summer out this way. Goldenrod and the fall asters are the last of it in most years, and the pollen off them builds the bees that have to make it through winter. Our rundown of major Central Texas honey plants covers forage month by month. We walk the land first and note what's already blooming and when, and that becomes the landscape plan the district is asking for. Nothing in the guidelines requires you to plant anything. If the bloom calendar has a real gap, we'll tell you what would fill it.

Replace a queen and Blanco CAD asks for a copy of the bill of sale. Buy your queens and you keep that receipt for the file. We raise our own, so no sale exists to document. We log every queen swap in the Outlaw Hideout, dated and by hive, and hand you that record. It isn't the bill of sale the guidelines ask for, so raise it with the district when you file.

The guidelines also ask you to register with the Texas Apiary Inspection Service, and that registration goes in your application packet. Texas doesn't require a beekeeper to register, and Blanco CAD doesn't make it a condition of qualifying either. Register anyway. When we manage your beekeeping, your land is logged as one of our apiary locations, and you get that record for your packet.

On the commercial side there's a basic marketing plan, covering how you'd sell the honey and other hive products. It's optional. Skip it and you'll have to show proof of a product of commercial value instead. When working with us, you get all the honey your land produces, so there's a product to sell, and we can put your own label on it. If someone other than you works the bees, Blanco CAD wants a written agreement signed by both parties, giving that party's name, address and a phone number the district can call. Ours has all of that in it.

On ten acres or less, Blanco CAD starts from the presumption that the land is residential. Separately, under its cropland exceptions, a small tract with a home on it, not part of a larger tract, "will be considered primarily residential, with agricultural use secondary," and agricultural use has to be the primary use to qualify. So a small-parcel application has to show beekeeping is the main thing the land is doing. The homesite comes out before the beekeeping acreage is counted, about an acre to start. Texas Tax Code 23.51(2) puts beekeeping between five and twenty acres, so that's the range the bees have to work. A five-acre place with a house comes up short once the homesite is out, so it takes about six acres to leave five in beekeeping. That's the arithmetic, not the answer to the primary-use question, but talk to the CAD about your acreage before you count on it.

The land needs an agricultural history behind it, too. Texas Tax Code 23.51(1) requires five of the last seven years in agricultural use, and 23.51(2) names beekeeping as one of those uses. So hives can build the history on their own, on a place that's never been farmed or grazed. It takes the years, and those years still have to show beekeeping as the land's main use. The history follows the land, so a buyer who just closed can lean on the parcel's earlier grazing or hay years toward the five of seven, as long as the records exist to prove it. The owner as of January 1 files, and Texas Tax Code 23.54 sets the filing deadline at April 30. Miss it and you can still file late under Texas Tax Code 23.541, up until the appraisal review board approves the appraisal records, for a penalty of 10 percent of the tax saved. There's an exception when the land changes hands. If it already had the agricultural valuation the year before, the new owner keeps using it the same way, and the same people are still running the operation, that penalty doesn't apply, so long as the application goes in within a year of the transfer or by the tax delinquency date, whichever is later.

The rollback is a change-of-use penalty. It applies when you stop farming the land or convert it to something non-agricultural. Texas Tax Code 23.55 sets it at the tax difference for the three years before the change, with no interest added. Under the same cropland exceptions, land can sit idle for an agriculturally related reason, never longer than two years. Blanco CAD requires a laying-idle form and a new 1-d-1 application the following year, and the call is the chief appraiser's.

If something about your parcel isn't clear, call Blanco CAD at (830) 868-4013. The district treats bees like any other ag operation, worked through the year on land that feeds them, with records to show it. We run that operation on your land.