Nick Van Brown of the Legislative Fiscal Division (LFD) told the House Agriculture Committee about interactive data tools the division maintains, noting the tools combine state and local financial data into live dashboards. "What these data tools are ... is a way to get the data that we have access to out to you all in a visual way," Van Brown said, describing budget and local-government dashboards and live data connections.

Kurt Swimley, LFD fiscal analyst who specializes in property taxes, walked members through a property-tax tool that isolates the agricultural and forest tax class and explained Montana's biannual appraisal cycle. "One of these tax classes that we've grouped together is the agriculture and forest classes, which is dominated by agricultural property," Swimley said, and he showed dashboards for taxes paid by class, taxable values, effective tax rates by levy district, and parcel-size distributions.

Swimley described valuation methods for agricultural land in Montana: valuation is "on a productivity basis," using soil surveys, land type (grazing, irrigated), and capitalization of productive capacity, which produces more uniform assessed values across counties than some other property classes. He noted data anomalies in 2020 that may reflect reporting issues rather than real acreage loss.

Analyst Joe Baughn presented USDA Agricultural Census summaries from 1997 through 2022 and noted regional differences in median farm size and counts of operations. "The last census was in 2022," Baughn said, and the division used that data to map acres operated by county and to show the share of county acreage reported as agricultural in the census.

Committee members asked whether the dashboards break down taxes paid to specific taxing units, include water districts and special districts, and whether farmstead improvements are valued separately from productive land. LFD staff said the financial dashboards pull data from local government financial systems and that they can drill down to taxes by municipality and levy district; they also said they would follow up on specific questions about farmstead valuation and the USDA definition of "acres operated."

LFD staff encouraged committee members to request tailored analyses and offered contact information for follow-up. The presentation did not involve a committee vote.