Farm and ranch land in Gaines County can be taxed on use, not market value

Few Texas counties live and die by working land the way Gaines does. It is the top peanut-producing county in the country and the second-largest cotton county in Texas, and most of that ground never gets taxed at what it would fetch on the open market. Texas lets working land be valued on what it produces instead, an ag valuation as folks call it, and out here the gap between sale price and use value is the line between a tax bill a family can carry and one that runs them off the land.

You file for it at the Gaines County Appraisal District. The catch lives on the way out, not the way in. Let the ag use lapse and lose the valuation, and a rollback tax claws back the break for the previous three years all at once. So if you're buying acreage to set a house on rather than turn a crop, that rollback is part of what the dirt actually costs you. Figure it in before you ever break ground.