Guadalupe County Beekeeping Ag Exemption

January 1 is the qualifying date, and each January 1 sets the valuation for that same tax year. So whichever January 1 your place qualifies on, that's the year you file for. Where agricultural use isn't evident on January 1, the chief appraiser may request more information from the property owner to support the claim of agricultural use on the land. Bees cluster in the cold, so live hives can look like nothing on a January morning. A quiet-looking place isn't the end of your application. Give the district office a call before January 1.

The district measures agricultural use "currently devoted" to the degree of intensity generally accepted in the area. It describes a typical operation as one run for the majority of the year, and it holds hives under production to that same standard. We handle that end under a managed beekeeping agreement. Our own colonies go on your land, we do the beekeeping on them, and they stay out there all twelve months. Nothing goes on a truck for a pollination contract in another county and nothing comes off for the winter.

The hive count is Guadalupe County CAD's, and the acreage band it works inside is the state's. Texas Tax Code 23.51(2) qualifies land used for bees at no less than 5 acres and no more than 20. Both numbers are acres in bees. You can cut hay on fifteen acres and keep bees on a wooded eight, and the district judges each use at its own degree of intensity. The guidelines also require all contiguous parcels under one ownership to be treated as one piece of property. Own two adjoining tracts and the district looks at the total.

In the beekeeping block of its agricultural land qualification guidelines, Guadalupe County CAD requires the bees to be kept to pollinate, to make human food, or to turn out another tangible product with a commercial value. A honey crop satisfies that condition. So does pollination on its own. The district measures the degree of intensity on your own land, so that's where the colonies have to be if an appraiser comes out to count them.

A residence on the tract changes the arithmetic. The homesite is the residential acreage under the homestead exemption, Texas Tax Code 11.13, and it comes out only where a house actually stands. In Guadalupe County it runs a quarter acre, plotted from aerial drone imagery, and it can be expanded. That quarter acre is carved out before the agricultural acreage is counted, so a place of exactly five acres comes to 4.75 once the house is on it. That's under the statute's floor, so a place with a house on it needs a full five acres left over after the homesite comes out.

Owning the acreage isn't enough on its own. Land doesn't qualify just because it's rural, or open, or has no other possible use. The guidelines name home vegetable gardens and recreational use as token use, which doesn't qualify either. Agriculture has to be what the land is principally for.

Then there's the history. Five out of seven years preceding the application have to show the land devoted principally to agricultural use, and the owner supplies that record. The guidelines point to business records as help toward establishing it. Keeping bees is on the district's own list of agricultural uses, alongside cultivating the soil and raising livestock. Because the land is judged on January 1, the record starts with the first January 1 the bees are on it. Colonies out in May give you nothing toward the five that year.

The form is the state's 50-129 and the district posts it on its own site. Filing falls due before May 1, which means postmarked or filed by midnight on April 30. A weekend or a holiday pushes it to the next business day, and the postmark counts as delivery. For good cause the chief appraiser can extend that by as much as 60 days, if the written request arrives before the April 30 deadline. Let April 30 pass without one and the application still gets taken, right up to the day before the appraisal review board approves that year's records. It carries a penalty then, 10 percent of the difference between tax at market value and tax at productivity value. Where the chief appraiser granted the extension, no penalty applies. Once the board signs the roll, that year is gone. Turned down, you get the reasons by certified mail with an explanation of how to protest, and the guidelines give you 30 days from the date of that letter to file one in writing. Bring all your supporting documentation to the hearing.

Once granted, the valuation holds without refiling as long as the land keeps qualifying, though the chief appraiser can call for another application periodically to confirm it. We'd put an application in every year regardless, which is our recommendation. A new one is required if the ownership changes, if the legal acreage changes, or if the use of the land changes. The valuation is granted to a specific legal ownership and terminates automatically on any change in ownership, so a buyer files fresh, and chasing down that application falls to the buyer.

Notice runs your way too. It goes to the district in writing when the ownership, the eligibility or the use type changes, and again in writing before April 30 if the land will sit idle for the year. Idle land can keep its eligibility, and the guidelines allow that for drought. That holds where a Governor-declared drought is the reason the land is out of production past its normal spell, where the owner intends to resume that use at the same degree of intensity once the drought ends, and where the owner maintains the perimeter fences and keeps up good stewardship of the land. Miss any one of those and the safety net isn't there. The district examines the intensity test in the application year and every year after. Run a colony or two above the floor. Bees die, and a count sitting exactly at the minimum in October might be under the minimum by February.

Coming up short in a year is a separate event from changing the use of the land. Stay in agriculture and drop below the degree of intensity, and the land may lose its eligibility for the valuation without incurring a roll-back. A roll-back takes a physical change, meaning agricultural operations stop or the land turns to something non-agricultural. Selling doesn't do it.

When one does fire, Texas Tax Code 23.55 recaptures the tax savings across three preceding years. There's no interest on it. Divert part of a tract and it reaches only that part. The chief appraiser decides whether and when the use changed, has to put that determination in writing, and it can be protested before a bill ever issues. If you're buying rather than holding, raise the roll-back question with the district office and with whoever handles your closing.

A tract inside a city or town is the harder case. The guidelines say such land often won't qualify, and that a parcel inside an incorporated city has to clear the ordinary requirements plus one further condition, with three ways to meet it. A city that doesn't give the land general services on par with what similar parts of town receive will do it. So will five continuous preceding years devoted principally to agricultural use, or those same five years of agriculture or timber production paired with wildlife management use. Seguin, Schertz and Cibolo all keep pushing outward, so this catches parcels their owners had taken for rural. If your acreage falls inside city limits, start with a call to the district office.

Our end of the job is the colonies and the record behind them. Standard 10-frame hives go on the land, a beekeeper is out there at least monthly, year-round, and every visit gets written up in the Outlaw Hideout. You can open your inspection history in it and pull a report for the district whenever one is called for. Registration with the Texas Apiary Inspection Service isn't required in Guadalupe County, though the district prefers it, and it's supporting documentation worth having either way, because it shows the livestock is under active management. On land we manage, keeping the TAIS registration current is our job, and your bee yard is one of the locations it lists. You come away with our documentation of the listing. The honey belongs to you. If selling it isn't for you, we'll put an offer in for the harvest. There's a packaging option too, which handles bottling and labels. The district deals with you, not with us. You put the application in under your own name, and our part is telling you what's standing out there.

Guadalupe County runs two ways. Schertz and Cibolo are suburbanizing hard on the San Antonio side, and out past Marion, Kingsbury and rural Seguin the country is native and improved pasture with dryland corn, sorghum and cotton. You'll find mesquite most places and yaupon where the cover thickens, and the bees work both where they stand. Horsemint and prairie verbena come on through the middle of the season, with goldenrod closing things out. We walk the land to find out which of them your acreage actually holds and the months each one runs. The rest of the Central Texas library covers what else comes on around here.