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.

Bell Peppers (CCD-CP-87) — 2017 budget — University of Kentucky — Center for Crop Diversification, 2017 · from Kentucky. Open the source. Fresh market, trickle irrigated. Fixed cost is the printed ~$14,600 total minus the two printed subtotals. This university printed only subtotals, so the lines below are its subtotals, not individual items. In today's prices this budget would run about $21,100–$21,735/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
Labor$8,750
Harvest and marketing (1,500 boxes)
Other inputs$4,815
Production costs (transplants, plastic, fertility, protection, field labor)
Land and overhead$1,035
Fixed and ownership costs (printed total, not itemized) · fixed
Your totals
Variable cost / acre$13,565
Fixed cost / acre$1,035
Total cost / acre$14,600
Total for 1 acre$14,600
Sales / acre$15,000
Left after costs / acre$400
Breakeven price$9.73 per 1 1/9-bushel 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: Bell pepper in Kentucky

Built from real yield records of Kentucky 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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