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.

Cucumber Production Enterprise Budget — University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture, 2017. Open the source. Costs only: this sheet prints no yield or price, so enter your own to see sales and what's left after costs. 5 ft rows, drip irrigation (8,712 ft of tape per acre). In today's prices this budget would run about $8,061–$8,682/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$205
Fertilizer
Seed and transplants$238
Seed and plants
Crop protection$210
Fungicide
Herbicide
Insecticide
Water and pumping$878
Irrigation supplies
Fuel and machinery$131
Diesel fuel
Repair and maintenance
Other inputs$3,553
Other supplies
Labor (all hand, harvest and operator labor)
Land and overhead$506
Interest on operating money
Fixed and ownership costs (printed total, not itemized) · fixed
Your totals
Variable cost / acre$5,250
Fixed cost / acre$470
Total cost / acre$5,721
Total for 1 acre$5,721

Sales / acreEnter a price
Left after costs / acre—
Breakeven price—

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: Slicing cucumber, irrigated in Arkansas

Built from real yield records of Arkansas 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 Arkansas? Add your records to these benchmarks in Settings → Privacy → Data sharing. It's off unless you turn it on.