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.

2025 Squash on Bareground Budget — University of Georgia CAES — Agricultural & Applied Economics, 2025. Open the source. In today's prices this budget would run about $4,039–$4,233/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$195
Nitrogen, phosphate and potash
Lime and amendments$45
Lime
Seed and transplants$312
Seed
Crop protection$717
Fungicide
Herbicide
Insecticide
Water and pumping$63
Irrigation
Labor$1,508
Field labor
Harvest, grading and containers (bundled in budget)
Fuel and machinery$121
Machinery
Other inputs$459
Interest on operating capital
Marketing
Other budget lines not itemized here (reconciles to the published total)
Land and overhead$620
Fixed and ownership costs (printed total, not itemized) · fixed
Your totals
Variable cost / acre$3,419
Fixed cost / acre$620
Total cost / acre$4,039
Total for 1 acre$4,039
Sales / acre$5,200
Left after costs / acre$1,161
Breakeven price$10.10 per 30-lb box

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: Summer squash (bareground) in Georgia

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