Does anyone here have experience of buying agricultural land, waiting two years, then applying for a permit to build a farmhouse? My wife and I are looking into the idea of doing that, but getting a lot of vague info from realtors, etc. We live near a lot of cheaply available farmland and would like to buy, lease it to a farmer for a couple of years, build on the permitted 10%, and then either sell the rest to the farmer or continue to lease it. Not sure how feasible this is though.
Any advice from people with first-hand knowledge of this would be greatly appreciated.
There are lots of laws and regulations in place to prevent people from doing exactly what you’re proposing here. Can you read Chinese? I’d advise reaching an article like this so you know what you’re getting in to.
By the way, my first-hand knowledge is that I know people who have attempted this, gotten part-way through building their cheapy "farm"house, then were fined and their build was (rightfully) destroyed by the government for violating the regulations.
I loathe this kind of thing with a passion. If the farmland is still being used for farming, why should anybody give a crap who, precisely, is living on the other 10%? Why is it “rightful” to destroy a perfectly good building simply because some bureaucrat thinks an arcane rule has been violated?
No doubt the answer will be something like “but but what if everyone got the same idea?”. Well, the outcome would be lots of nice houses in the middle of productive farm lots, and the whole country might look a bit nicer.
To the OP: I know two people who did this, and they did it by starting off with a very small building and doing some actual farming. As I understand it, once you have the small building you can at some point in the future make it bigger, but I’m not sure of the details, or whether this is even legal (as opposed to a workaround).
I think basic land zoning is a pretty normal thing in most developed countries, actually. It’s part of the [Agricultural Development Act](Agricultural Development Act - Chapter - Laws & Regulations Database of The Republic of China (Taiwan) which is intented to protect the amount of agricultural resources available in a given area. People and governments depend on a certain amount of crop being produced, and building houses on that land threatens that production. It gets in to the topic of food security for a country as well.
EDIT: Not sure why my link isn’t formatting properly here, but you get the idea.
Of course it doesn’t. One of the biggest threats to farmland is theft and vandalism. You need houses on farmland, and you need a sufficient number of them that ne’er-do-wells are discouraged from seeing what they can take or destroy.
What the OP is proposing is a win-win; he gets to build a house, someone else gets to do some farming. If more people did it, food security would be enhanced.
The main reason for these rules is to prevent people from building their own houses cheaply. It props up the banking cartel. There’s nothing wrong with land zoning per se, but the form of the regulations in Taiwan (and indeed in many countries) is clearly intended to tie up any possible loopholes that would permit farmers - and owners of farmland - to make the maximum possible use of their assets.
Okay, agree to disagree on the merits of illegally building on farmland (of course, there’s a path to do it legally described in the original article I linked which I have no issue with). Regardless, it’s off the topic of how OP can do it, and I’d think we’d only recommend legal methods to them.
In any case, I don’t see anything unlawful or sneaky in what the OP is planning to do. The outcome is precisely the same as if he were to (for example) have a family member handle the farming while he simply puts up the capital for the land.
I think the problem comes with selling of the 90% of the land after, if its rented out its fine as its still one bit of land with 10% used for building.
I don’t think it would be legally possible to do that anyway, since the house would be “attached” to the farmland. Leasing it to someone else to operate seems to me to be entirely within the spirit of the law, although perhaps not within the letter of it. I believe you have to be anointed as an official farmer in order to actually own farmland, and I’m not sure what arcane ritual this involves. I suspect you have to douse yourself in sulfoxaflor and set fire to a pile of old car tires.
My family own farmland and lease part of it out, it’s not illegal. We also use contractors to do jobs on the land, I don’t see why you couldn’t just lease it all out, as long as the government inspector can see its being farmed I don’t think they care who did the work.
Be born, its part generational land and also acquisitions, but as they are already farmers buying land is easier (even thought they have other jobs). I don’t know what would happen if they signed some “farmland” over to me, maybe I would become a farmer too
Yeah, I gathered there was some hereditary component, in that you can be “born a farmer”. I was wondering what a foreigner might have to do, or even an ordinary Taiwanese person, to “become a farmer”. Other than to actually do the job. Taiwan seems to be unique in this weird requirement that you have to “be” a farmer, as opposed to just doing farming.
