Cost per acre calculator

Pick your state and crop to start from a published university budget, line by line. Change any number to match your own farm — your numbers replace theirs.

Vine Ripe Tomato Budget — 2025 — NC State Extension — Agricultural & Resource Economics, 2025. Open the source. In today's prices this budget would run about $18,760–$19,547/acre (USDA farm-input price index, 2025 average to August 2026; farm wages brought up separately with USDA's farm wage rates).

Line items per acre
Fertilizer$748
Fertilizer and lime (6-3-18, 13-0-44, CN-9, lime)
Seed and transplants$6
Seed
Crop protection$3,167
Fumigant
Herbicide
Insecticide
Fungicide
Labor$8,537
Field labor (drip, planting, staking, stringing, spraying, pruning)
Picking labor
Packing labor
Post-harvest cleanup labor
Fuel and machinery$75
Tractor and machinery
Other inputs$4,601
Plastic mulch
Drip tape
Stakes
String and twine
Boxes (25 lb)
Crop and income insurance
Interest on operating capital
Other budget lines not itemized here (reconciles to the published total)
Land and overhead$1,626
Fixed and ownership costs (printed total, not itemized) · fixed
Your totals
Variable cost / acre$17,134
Fixed cost / acre$1,626
Total cost / acre$18,760
Total for 1 acre$18,760
Sales / acre$19,320
Left after costs / acre$560
Breakeven price$0.45 per lb

Every figure is transcribed from a published land-grant enterprise budget for that state. These are planning budgets built from grower panels and dealer quotes, not surveys of what farms actually spent — your invoices override them everywhere they exist.

Planning several crops? Use the crop profitability planner. Want profit against your state's real sales figures? Open the profit per acre calculator.

Pooled farmer benchmark: Staked tomato in North Carolina

Built from real yield records of North Carolina farms that chose to share their data. A figure only appears once 5 or more farms have logged the same crop and season, so no single farm can be identified.

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Farm in North Carolina? Add your records to these benchmarks in Settings → Privacy → Data sharing. It's off unless you turn it on.