To figure your elected farm income, first figure your taxable income from farming or fishing. This includes all income, gains, losses, and deductions attributable to any farming or fishing business. Include the deduction for one-half of self-employment tax only to the extent that deduction is attributable to your farming or fishing business. However, it does not include gain from the sale or other disposition of land.
You should find your income, gains, losses and deductions from farming or fishing reported on different tax forms, such as:
- Form 1040, line 7, income from wages and other compensation you received as a shareholder in an S corporation engaged in a farming or fishing business;
- Schedule C or C-EZ;
- Schedule D;
- Schedule E, Part II;
- Schedule F;
- Form 4797; and
- Form 4835.
Your elected farm income is the amount of your taxable income from farming or fishing that you elect to include on line 2. However, you do not have to include all of your taxable income from farming or fishing on line 2. It may be to your advantage to include less than the entire amount, depending on how the amount you include on line 2 affects your tax bracket for the current and prior 3 tax years.
Your elected farm income cannot exceed your taxable income. Also, the portion of your elected farm income treated as a net capital gain cannot exceed the smaller of your total net capital gain or your net capital gain attributable to your farming or fishing business. If your elected farm income includes net capital gain, you must allocate an equal portion of the net capital gain to each of the base years. If, for any base year, you had a capital loss that resulted in a capital loss carryover to the next tax year, do not reduce the elected farm income allocated to that base year by any part of the carryover.
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