They never had any desire to farm, and the three pair of emus they must keep penned up on their 35-acre rural estate to remain legal have added almost nothing to Oregon's farm economy. Yet Clackamas County taxes most of the land owned by Scott W. Reid and his family based on its value as a farm. For years, the Reids didn't even realize they were getting the tax break. Welcome to farm deferral in Oregon. The state established the system in 1961 as an incentive for landowners to keep their acreage in farming.
Advocates praise it for helping keep farmers from being taxed out of business.
It might also push the limits of the state land-use system by luring hobby farmers to the country in search of cheaper taxes, encouraging sprawl, according to a state tax report. The problem is that, because there are no specific requirements other than the fact that the property has to be devoted to farm use, it's relatively easy to qualify and extremely difficult for the assessor to argue that it's not being used for farm use, unless the property is sitting there completely idle and growing weeds. Meanwhile, to make up for part of the revenue lost to farm tax breaks, the rest of Oregon's taxpayers have millions of extra dollars in taxes thrust upon them through increases in other tax rates. While the largest bulk of specially assessed land is in Eastern Oregon, a higher percentage of exempted property value comes from elsewhere in the state, where property values are higher. On average, most of the land is assessed at 25 percent to 35 percent of its real-market value.