'taxes on small farming ventures' Rural Living

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taxes on small farming ventures

Is that the tax for all small farms or can it be less if you earn much less?

A small farm will also attract a rural land tax called contribucion rural. It used to cost me about 1, 600 pesos a year but since unipersonalising, I no longer have to pay it as I now get an exemption for being unipersonalised and smaller than 50 hectares.

Farmland, farm buildings and equipment/machinery necessary for farming are all exempt from IP (Wealth Tax) and although farm houses can be assessed for IP, they get an 50% reduction on their already low assessed value.

Unipersonalised small farmers pay no IRPF (income tax.) Instead they suffer a small sales tax style levy on produce which they sell to registered grain and cattle merchants. Private sales seem to pass under the radar.

A "temporary" 10% sales tax currently applies on the sale of farmland.

No domestic property taxes are applied to rural farm houses.

I should think the lawyer is referring to contribucion rural but you'd need to own a very large or very valuable farm for the tax to get anywhere near 5, 125 US dollars.

Did you find it necessary to use an attorney to help with land title, registration of your business, immigration application, etc...

We still plan to grow fruit on a small scale. Probably some vegetables too.

Are there any restrictions on making the homemade jams, jellies, preserves

and selling them? We' been selling our low sugar items for 10 years with

great success. It is something that as disabled people we can do together.

Quality time that is productive.

Yes to all including the purchase of a used car but I used a non-lawyer immigration advisor to help with immigration as my Espanol was near zero back then.

"We still plan to grow fruit on a small scale. Probably some vegetables too.

Are there any restrictions on making the homemade jams, jellies, preserves

and selling them?"

There are very few restrictions on what you can do in the campo. A neighbour of mine distils excellent grappa and I avoid imposing a 25, 000 mile journey on bean sprouts by sprouting my own soya beans rather than sending them to China for them to do the sprouting and flying them back to the ROU in a tired condition like most ROU supermarkets do.

OTOH you may well have problems if you try to sell cooked/ sprouted/ distilled etc items through regular channels where the dead hand of bureaucracy tends to intervene. OTOH selling stuff informally to friends, acquaintances and neighbours is not a problem. I'm gradually introducing mine to the delights of freshly sprouted beans stir-fried :-)

My next new production attempt will be button mushrooms. The few fresh ones I see in supermarkets come from places like France, Japan, Slovakia and China and except for local wild fungi in season, I've only met a cultivated Uru mushroom once. At Disco in MVD today they had 5 small pre-packed trays available from Bordeaux at 1, 270 pesos/kilo!!! All the canned mushrooms available locally seem to come from China.

There are a lot of apparent holes in the Uruguayan market but there are also a lot of bureaucrats who seem to think that its their duty to stop anybody who tries to fill them :-)

We were already looking to buy land eithet already with fruit trees or

plant our own. He is diabetic and i'm just fat.

But if we can sell the excess to others then it would be good.

I really wish i knew how to get some of our mayhaws down there

- they would be a real hit. But we also do well with blueberries, peaches, plums, muscadines,

Pears, crab apples, quince, cherries, and persimmons.

If anyone hears of a few hectaes with an established orchard for sale please let me know.

Before he got so bad off he had a pig farm and raised cows too. I like goats, but only as pets.

And love our fresh yard eggs.

You don't need to actually grow, rear, produce or sell anything to unipersonalize as a small farmer. All you need to do is to own farmland, register yourself as a self-employed small farmer and pay the BPS contributions on the dates due. Nobody will come to inspect what you are doing and because there is no income tax involved, any farm profit and loss accounts are private matters. If you decide to "rest" your land for a while, that's your business and is of no concern to the BPS.

After all, its quite acceptable to be a useless farmer, an anarcho- syndicalist farmer who views profits as evil or a self-sufficiency farmer :-)

Blueberries have become a popular crop in these parts down along the shores of the Rio Plata since the US slackened its import controls.

You mentioned in a post that if you are unipersonalised and under 50 Hectares that you are exempt from contribution rural. Do you know if this only for Colonia or applies elsewhere in Uruguay?

The other point that causes me some disturbance - you mentioned that there is a "temporary" sales tax of 10% on sale of farm land - do you know if this is in addition to the 12% tax?

Thanks

Sharon

I think its a nationwide scheme. Its not terribly important as the contribucion rural wasn't very much (just over 100 U$S/year if my memory serves me.) I pay my BPS and claim my contribucion rural exoneration through my local gestor... I suspect that you will have one locally. They usually lurk in your local centro commercial offices.

"The other point that causes me some disturbance - you mentioned that there is a "temporary" sales tax of 10% on sale of farm land - do you know if this is in addition to the 12% tax?"

I thought that the "temporary" sales tax was fixed at 10% of the farmland transaction value but I was fortunate in buying farmland before it was introduced in 2006. I haven't heard of a 12% tax... perhaps the temporary tax has been increased? I'd ask a local inmobilario if I was you.

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