SpaceX may be getting into the interplanetary agricultural business. Or maybe not.
The Hawthorne-based rocket maker has announced it’s looking to hire a farmer to till the land around the company’s central Texas test site, sparking a flurry of speculation online that SpaceX is interested in developing space gardens.
Elon Musk has said that the only way to ensure mankind’s survival is to make the human species interplanetary, and any future Mars colony is going to need to figure out how to farm.
NASA is already testing fresh food production on the International Space Station with experiments that were delivered by SpaceX rockets in April.
Like Musk, NASA is interested in sending humans beyond Earth’s orbit. On Thursday, the space agency is conducting the first flight test of the deep-space Orion capsule that could one day take astronauts to Mars.
It’s unclear why SpaceX is looking to hire a farmer with 10 years of experience in “row crop farming,” “maintenance of John Deere agricultural equipment” and the ability “to climb ladders and work in tight spaces,” according to a post on the company’s job listings Web page.
A SpaceX spokesman did not respond to questions about the farmer position.
A much-cited post on Agriculture.com claimed SpaceX could be looking to rezone some of the property around its launch site as a way to earn tax exemptions.
A loophole in Texas agricultural law allows ranch owners to pay property taxes based on agricultural production instead of on the market value of the land.
So if a $20 million ranch only yielded $20,000 in alfalfa last year, the owner would pay property taxes only on that $20,000.
“You’re talking about a major, major economic boost,” said Mike Farah, a real estate lawyer specializing in farm and ranch law.
Farah, who manages several high net-worth clients, said it is common practice to maintain some farm activities to receive this tax exemption, officially called an agricultural property tax appraisal.
“It’s a very safe place to place many millions of dollars, have that property grow in value and not pay very high taxes to keep it,” he said. “There’s nothing shady about it.”
Of the 600-plus acres that SpaceX leases from the city of McGregor and Texas A&M University, only about 127 are dedicated to rocket testing, according to the McLennan County Appraisal District, which oversees the area that includes the SpaceX test site. The rest of the land is farmland that acts as a buffer for potential rocket explosions.
None of the land at the SpaceX test site is zoned for agricultural use, even though “farmers have been on that land for a number of years,” said McLennan agricultural appraiser Matt Davis.
Hiring an in-house farmer may give SpaceX greater control over the farming activities that surround its facility. The job posting says that the farmer must work around SpaceX’s test schedule.
“It could be as simple as they have a lot of land and they are looking for someone to manage it,” Farah said.
Or maybe Musk wants to provide organic produce as a perk for his rocket testers.
