Williamson County Beekeeping Ag Exemption

Where there's a residence, Williamson CAD assigns at least an acre to the homesite, the residential carve-out tied to your homestead exemption. Your homestead filing can push it higher, and so can more than an acre fenced in with the house. The fence is the one people miss, because a parcel record won't show where a yard fence runs. Under Texas Tax Code 11.13 a residence homestead can take in up to 20 acres around the structure, where the land is genuinely part of the residence. Williamson CAD decides how much of that your homesite actually takes. Every acre that moves across comes out of your qualifying acreage, and when you only have a little more than five acres that can cost you the valuation. Two adjoining tracts under your own ownership count as one property. Two neighbors pooling acres get no such treatment. The manual lets other agricultural uses combine land that way and leaves beekeeping out of it.

January 1 is the date the hives have to be standing on your land. Colonies have to be out there by then, which rules out an order placed in December. Established colonies can go on the land in the fall and sit through winter. Packages ordered for spring don't reach us here until April into May, well past January 1, so that route loses the year. The land also has to stay in a qualifying use all year and in agricultural use for the majority of it. Hives we manage overwinter on your land, so they're standing when the date comes.

The guidelines put honey alongside livestock and crops, and say maintaining livestock on its own won't qualify a property. The manual qualifies beekeeping used for pollination or for the production of human food or other tangible products having a commercial value, and it says the property needs to be producing. Hives kept for the pantry won't meet that. Agriculture also has to be the land's principal use. The guidelines name token agricultural use undertaken to get tax relief, and the district screens for it with the intensity standard. The standard is there to stop hives that nobody works.

If someone other than the owner keeps the bees, that's a lease, and the district does require a current copy with the application. The guidelines then ask the lease to show the owner's name, the property identification number, the acres, the purpose, the term and the rent if any changes hands, plus the beekeeper's name, address and phone, signed and dated by everyone on it. Our managed beekeeping agreement carries every one of those. The guidelines add that a lease alone isn't sufficient evidence without photos, receipts and whatever else the district asks to see. Your visit record lives in the Outlaw Hideout, the app you get access to when you have a management agreement with us. Every visit goes in dated, with the inspection notes from that day. Honey yield gets weighed once a season, usually in summer, and that weight goes in with the rest. We don't file your 1-d-1 application for you, but the record we keep is there when the district asks what the land produced.

Inside a city limit the history test tightens to five of the last five years, continuously, where land outside one needs five of the preceding seven. State law also keeps land inside an incorporated city out of the valuation unless it clears one of the statute's exceptions. Two of those bear on a bee tract. Either the city doesn't provide the land with services comparable to the rest of the city, or the land has been devoted principally to agricultural use continuously for the preceding five years. Georgetown, Hutto, Taylor and Liberty Hill aren't the only incorporated cities in the county. Call Williamson CAD at (512) 930-3787 if there's a city line anywhere close to your boundary.

Texas Tax Code 23.51(1) sets that five-of-seven history, and no district can waive it. Williamson CAD's guidelines describe that history in two places, and which reading governs a bee tract is ambiguous. One section asks for proof of prior agricultural or beekeeping use, and another says the land must already have held the agricultural valuation through those years. Plan against the stricter reading and ask the district where your parcel falls. For evidence it points at Texas Apiary Inspection Service transport permits, financial records showing active honey production, and leases. A stationary apiary doesn't generate a TAIS transport permit, since those cover interstate movement. The lease does that job instead, and the district won't take it on its own. Our yield weights and dated visit records go with it. TAIS registration is a separate matter from the permit. When you sign with us, we manage the registration. Your land goes on it as one of the yards we work, the way a beekeeper's record lists where the bees sit, and TAIS holds that location list closed. Ag valuation is one of the purposes you check at registration, and TAIS asks for a screenshot of that page to go to the appraisal district. Where we manage it, we send that screenshot.

Where the years aren't there, the manual sets out how to build them. An application and a field check every year for five years, then a filing in the sixth. Documents of prior agricultural use can shorten or avoid that, and the manual lists an IRS Schedule F, receipts, notarized affidavits and dated photographs. Those document a history the land already has and don't waive the requirement. If you're buying, the valuation attaches to a specific ownership rather than following the land automatically, and the manual sets out both when a new application is required and the narrow cases where one isn't. Ask the district which applies to your purchase.

The application is the state 1-d-1 form, Comptroller form 50-129, and it's due April 30. Williamson CAD denies a blank or badly completed one and sends a denial letter explaining how to protest. You get 30 days from the date on that letter to file a written protest, and you bring your supporting documents to the hearing. Ask before May 1 and the chief appraiser can grant up to 60 more days for good cause, with no penalty. Without that extension, a late application still gets taken until the appraisal review board certifies the year's records, which usually happens in July. It costs 10 percent of what the valuation would have saved. A buyer who keeps the land in the same use, overseen by the same people as the year before, escapes that penalty by filing within a year of the purchase or by the tax delinquency date, whichever of the two lands later.

Williamson CAD routinely inspects the properties holding the valuation. Where it finds one out of compliance, the response can run from a request for a fresh application, through removal of the agricultural value, to a rollback, depending on the circumstances. If agriculture stops, or the use or its intensity changes, you have to tell the chief appraiser in writing by April 30 following the change, and as soon as development starts. Miss that notice and a 10 percent penalty can land on the rollback amount. A rollback follows a change to non-agricultural use, subdividing to sell, including putting in roads or utilities, or a restriction you place on the land yourself that limits it to something non-agricultural. The chief appraiser sends written notice of a change-of-use determination, and you get 30 days from it to protest. Under Texas Tax Code 23.55 the recapture runs three years back, takes the tax the valuation saved across them, and carries no interest. It bites only where the use actually changed, so a tract that changed in part is recaptured in part. Interest enters only once the bill itself goes delinquent.

The district's own land classes split at IH-35, and so does the forage. Blackland prairie and row crop east of the interstate toward Taylor and Granger, thinner soil west of it toward Liberty Hill and Florence. Prairie verbena works a long stretch of the warm season on both sides of that line. Goldenrod comes in late enough to feed the bees that have to hold the colony together until spring. We keep a list of the Central Texas honey plants that runs well past those two. Walk your place before the first hive goes out and you'll know which of them you've got.