The Business End of Forests

State forestry agencies offer information on a wide variety of woodland stewardship topics from bugs to fire to wood markets to rules and regulations to current use taxes.

Women and Our Woods Workshop for Women Woodland Owners

Hidden Valley Nature Center  131 Egypt Rd., Jefferson, ME 04348, July 30, 2016, 9:00-4:00

$45 ($40 for HVNC, Midcoast Conservancy, MOFGA, MFLT members), $25 Students    Scholarships available!!

Women and Our Woods

Women and Our Woods Workshop for Women Woodland Owners

Hidden Valley Nature Center  131 Egypt Rd., Jefferson, ME 04348, July 30, 2016, 9:00-4:00

$45 ($40 for HVNC, Midcoast Conservancy, MOFGA, MFLT members), $25 Students    Scholarships available!!

Women and Our Woods

Empowering Maine’s women woodland owners to steward our forestlands

As a forest landowner, you must keep good records in order to take maximum advantage of the special tax treatments available for timber. At a minimum, you should keep a tree farm journal that lists all activities, costs, and incomes from the forest (see example below). You also should have accounts for land, timber, and other capital assets. When setting up timber basis accounts, it is a good idea to use Form T Forest Activities Schedule as a guide. It may be required when claiming depletion of the timber basis after a timber sale or loss.

I hope most of you don’t need to read this but we need to talk about what to do if you had fire on your property in 2015.  Normally, taxpayers are only able to recover their investment in timber at the time of a harvest.  This is done through the use of depletion.  However, if you have a loss on your property, you can also reclaim some of that investment in the form of a casualty loss deduction.

A special provision allows you to deduct up to $10,000 in reforestation expenditures per tax year, per qualified timber property.