Speaking of selling wood, in Georgia, land is assessed as if there was no standing timber on it. When and if you sell it, you then have to pay
property taxes on that wood, per ton, depending on what type of wood it is, going by a chart that is updated yearly. We just went through this with the county. They say south Ga is to blame with its millions of acres of standing pines for lumber, that the entire state suffers for that. They have officials cruising around checking for it to see if it looks like you have cut wood off your place. The only time you get off scott free is if you are using it for your own firewood or if you give the timber away, say in exchange for someone taking it off for doing the work, assuming all the risk and doing the labor.
Wood is worth less this year than last year, at least in my county. Folks think timber is worth something, but here in GA, unless you have good yellow pine for lumber, it's worth almost ZERO. The exceptions are sawtimber or poles, IF you take them to the mill yourself. If not, you get the going rate from whoever takes it off your land, about $5/ton.
Hardwood for firewood is valued at just over $4 per ton, softwood pulp is worth just under $9 per ton. It must be divided by exactly what type of tree you take off. Not all pines are equal, not all hardwoods are equal. You won't get rich selling timber in GA unless you have hundreds of acres of pine suitable for good lumber. Hardwood is worth almost nothing at all here, we found. Interesting. And because they are raising land taxes beyond our means, we cannot own our acreage we want any longer, sadly.
Doesn't matter that you can't sell it for anything, they'll tax it as if you can.
Sooooo, 5.37 acres soon to be less, unfortunately. 5 was always my magic number. Not so magic any longer in this day and time. That really bites, too.
For those interested, here is the chart of timber values in Georgia that they go by, that varies by county:
https://etax.dor.ga.gov/PTD/cas/timber/tables/2012/LGS_Table_of_Owner_Harvest_Timber_Values_2012.pdf
If you have the equipment (saws, truck, skidder, etc) can take it to the mill yourself and do all the dangerous work, you can make more. If you have someone else do it and pay you, the going rate here is $5 per ton, period. That is per loggers as well as the county forester. Not worth the trouble and the mess to have logging equipment tear up your ground and do a clear cut if you have small acreage you must look at every day,
if you can get a logger to even look at small acreage. Most will not bother.
Owning acreage for a homestead, to do what you want and for privacy, etc, is a dream of many BYC folks. That dream may be crushed in a day of money-hungry counties reassessing to grab tax money. Remember Californians years ago whose houses worth $100-200K were suddenly supposedly worth a million? Reminds me of that on a smaller scale.
I apologize for getting a bit off track. For those who own big acreage, are you being taxed to death over it? And have the reassessed it in recent years? Do you anticipate a problem with that when they do?
