Farms and agricultural buildings
Your farm has buildings the tax code treats on their own terms.
A grain bin is not a barn, and the tax code agrees. Structures built for one farm purpose, plus irrigation and fencing, can move off the standard schedule. A study sorts your property piece by piece, and is honest about what does not fit a standard chart.
The baseline
Farm buildings do not all follow the same clock.
A general-purpose farm building, like a machine shed used for many jobs, usually depreciates like any other nonresidential building. But a structure built for one specific farm use, a grain bin, a greenhouse, a milking parlor, is different. Congress gave thesespecialized single-purpose agricultural and horticultural structures their own category in the tax code, with a set 10-year life instead of the standard building schedule.
What a study sorts out
Where the faster deductions hide on a farm.
Single-purpose structures
Grain bins, greenhouses, and other structures built for one farm use follow their own rule in the tax code, separate from the standard building schedule.
Irrigation systems
Wells, pumps, and the pipe that delivers water to a field are analyzed on their own, apart from the land they sit on.
Fencing and land improvements
Perimeter and pasture fencing, drives, and other site work are 15-year land improvements, the same rule that applies on any working property.
Equipment-serving hookups
Power and water runs that exist only to feed a specific piece of farm equipment can move with that equipment instead of staying with the building.
The honest part
Farms do not fit neatly into one row of a chart.
Our baseline data covers common commercial and residential property types, and farms are not one of them. When a property does not match a row we already have, we say so. We map your buildings to the closest type we do have data for, and we do not invent a percentage that is not backed by data.
The single-purpose structures are different: those get their own rule under the tax code, not a percentage from a chart at all. In Thirup v. Commissioner, the court looked at what a greenhouse actually did, not what it looked like from the outside, to decide how it should depreciate. That same question, what does this structure actually do, is how we approach every farm building.See what makes a study audit-defensible.
- What a farm study documents:
- Single-purpose structures identified and cited to the rule
- The closest matching baseline named, when no exact match exists
- Irrigation and fencing tied to their own class
- No invented percentages, ever
See what your farm buildings are worth in deductions.
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