Ask a farmer whether they run a research department and you will get a laugh. Ask whether they have spent twenty years working out which seed and which fertilizer program perform best on their own ground, and the answer is yes. In 2022, the Tax Court connected those two facts for the first time.
J.G. Boswell is one of the largest farming operations in the country. It claimed the federal R&D tax credit for the work it put into developing and improving how it grows its crops. The IRS pushed back with the line farmers have heard for decades: farming is not research. The Tax Court disagreed and sided with the farm.
For most of the credit's life it was treated as the private property of technology and pharmaceutical companies. Boswell was the first real crack in that wall for agriculture. It established that row-crop farming can meet the same four-part test Congress wrote for everyone else, and that the everyday work of trying to grow a better crop counts as the kind of experimentation the credit was built to reward.
Boswell did not invent anything. It said out loud what good farmers already knew. Deciding how to grow a crop better is a technical problem, and working through a technical problem is research.
We read Boswell as a floor, not a ceiling. It confirmed crops. It left the obvious next question, livestock, sitting unanswered, and it would take another four years and the George case to settle that one. It also planted a theme that has only grown louder since. The credit is real, but it belongs to the farms that can show their work. Boswell won because the research held up to scrutiny.
If you have run trials on your operation and never claimed the credit, this is the case that says you were probably entitled to. The next one, George, shows exactly how to keep it.