Does a spring or creek add value to a farm?
Yes, when the water does work for the farm, and each use is checked in a different place. Stock water is measured against Virginia's withdrawal reporting thresholds, streams and ponds count in the land use acreage the Commissioner of the Revenue reviews, drinking water goes to the health department, and low ground along a creek goes on the flood map. The dollar effect is an opinion of value.
A spring and a stream are two different things under the federal naming standard
The first check a buyer makes is which feature is actually on the property, because the two work differently. In the U.S. Geological Survey's Geographic Names Information System, a spring is a place where underground water flows naturally to the surface, and a stream is a linear body of water flowing on the surface. A spring is fed from below; a creek is water already moving across the ground.
Who may use that water, and how much, is a legal subject of its own, covered at springs, creeks and water rights. This page stays with the checks that decide what the water does for a farm.
Watering livestock from either one can trigger a state reporting duty
Virginia tracks water use above a threshold. Except as the regulation itself provides, its water withdrawal reporting rule applies to every user whose average daily withdrawal of groundwater or surface water during any single month exceeds 10,000 gallons a day, and reportable withdrawals include livestock watering.
Crop irrigation has its own threshold: withdrawals over 1 million gallons in any single month. Irrigators need not report withdrawals from ponds that collect diffuse surface water and are not on a perennial stream as shown on USGS 7.5-minute topographic maps, unless the pond is a dug pond that intercepts the groundwater table. Where a farm sits against either number is a matter of the actual gallons, not the size of the place.
The ground under a pond or a stream stays in the qualifying acreage
For a farm carried under land use taxation, the water on the place is not subtracted from the count. Virginia's statute includes lakes, dams, ponds, streams and irrigation ditches in the area devoted to the qualifying use, while land under and used with the farmhouse, or any structure not related to that use, is left out.
So a creek through a hayfield or a pond in a pasture is part of the acreage measured for use value assessment. Whether the property as a whole qualifies is still the Commissioner of the Revenue's decision, a subject covered more fully in Virginia's land use program.
Drinking water, the flood map and the dollar figure each have their own answer
A spring or creek a buyer hopes to drink from, rather than only water stock from, is a question for the local health department, not a real estate one. What a spring box does and does not do is covered at spring box.
Low ground along a creek, what the glossary calls bottomland, raises a separate check: whether it falls inside a mapped flood hazard area. That is a question for the FEMA flood map and the county floodplain administrator, covered in full at can I build in a floodplain. It reaches barns too: a farm building that is otherwise exempt from the building code stays subject to flood-proofing regulations when it lies within a flood plain.
None of these checks produces a dollar figure by itself. What a spring feeding a trough, or a creek watering two pastures, adds depends on the rest of the farm around it: the acreage, the fencing, the access, and what a buyer plans to do with the water. That is weighed in an opinion of value. Whether two-road frontage changes a similar farm's number is answered at does frontage on two roads change farm value.
Have a farm with a spring, creek or pond on it?
Send the county, the acreage and how the water is used today, for stock, irrigation or a house. Lowell will look at where the water sits on the farm before he puts a figure on what it adds. No cost, no obligation.
Got it. Thank you.
We'll be in touch shortly with an honest read.
Questions this raises
Does a spring or creek give a farm unlimited water rights?
No rule a buyer can rely on says so. Virginia's reporting regulation reaches users whose average daily withdrawal in any single month exceeds 10,000 gallons a day, livestock watering included, and crop irrigation above 1 million gallons in a month. How much an owner may take as against neighbors along the same stream is a riparian rights question for an attorney.
Does a pond count differently from a natural spring for land use taxation?
The statute names lakes, dams, ponds, streams and irrigation ditches in the qualifying area, but it does not name springs, so how the ground at a spring is counted on a given farm is the Commissioner of the Revenue's call. Whether the parcel around either one qualifies for the classification is that office's decision too.
Where this page's facts come from
Every rule, office and figure above traces to one of these. Rules change; check the office before you act on one.
- GNIS domestic names feature classes (spring, stream) U.S. Geological Survey
- 9VAC25-200-30, water withdrawal reporting requirements Virginia Administrative Code
- Va. Code 58.1-3236, area devoted to agricultural, horticultural, forest or open space use Virginia General Assembly
- Va. Code 36-99, farm buildings and flood-proofing regulations Virginia General Assembly