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.

Constructing a Southwest Florida Bell Peppers Enterprise Budget (FE1088) — UF/IFAS — Food & Resource Economics, 2020. Open the source. Cost-only budget: it reports $16.73/carton total cost and does not assume a selling price. 2019/20 input prices. In today's prices this budget would run about $25,221–$26,771/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$1,293
Fertilizer and lime
Seed and transplants$2,465
Transplants
Crop protection$2,219
Fumigant and nematicide
Herbicide
Insecticide
Fungicide
Labor$4,008
General farm labor
Tractor driver labor
Picking, packing and hauling
Fuel and machinery$1,582
Tractor and equipment operation
Farm trucks
Other inputs$3,314
Scouting
Drip tube
Plastic mulch
Stakes
Plastic string
String and stake removal
Pull and bundle mulch
Dumpster
Interest on operating capital (8%)
Selling
Containers
Land and overhead$3,519
Fixed and ownership costs (printed total, not itemized) · fixed
Your totals
Variable cost / acre$14,881
Fixed cost / acre$3,519
Total cost / acre$18,400
Total for 1 acre$18,400
Sales / acreEnter a price
Left after costs / acre—
Breakeven price$16.73 per 28-lb carton

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: Bell pepper in Florida

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