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.

Watermelon Production Budget for North Florida (FE1104) — UF/IFAS — Food & Resource Economics, 2021. Open the source. Harvest and marketing are published as one $2,476/ac block (including $100 food-safety and packinghouse overhead) rather than itemized. In today's prices this budget would run about $6,852–$7,122/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$284
Fertilizer (dry and liquid)
Lime and amendments$13
Lime
Seed and transplants$599
Seed (market and pollinizer)
Transplant production
Crop protection$314
Herbicide
Fungicide
Insecticide
Water and pumping$41
Electricity
Electric standby charge
Labor$2,798
Field labor (machine, irrigation, fertigation, planting, other)
Harvesting and marketing (published as one block)
Fuel and machinery$117
Fuel and lube
Repairs
Other inputs$875
Interest on operating capital
Other budget lines not itemized here (reconciles to the published total)
Land and overhead$518
Fixed and ownership costs (printed total, not itemized) · fixed
Your totals
Variable cost / acre$5,041
Fixed cost / acre$518
Total cost / acre$5,559
Total for 1 acre$5,559
Sales / acre$6,800
Left after costs / acre$1,241
Breakeven price$0.14 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: Watermelon 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.