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.

Broccoli (CCD-CP-88) — 2017 budget — University of Kentucky — Center for Crop Diversification, 2017 · from Kentucky. Open the source. Trickle-irrigated plasticulture, mostly fall crop. Fixed cost not printed. This university printed only subtotals, so the lines below are its subtotals, not individual items. In today's prices this budget would run about $7,983–$8,240/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$3,165
Harvest and marketing (as printed)
Other inputs$2,365
Production costs (as printed)
Your totals
Variable cost / acre$5,530
Fixed cost / acre$0
Total cost / acre$5,530
Total for 1 acre$5,530
Sales / acre$6,750
Left after costs / acre$1,220
Breakeven price$12.29 per 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: Broccoli 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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Farm in Kentucky? Add your records to these benchmarks in Settings → Privacy → Data sharing. It's off unless you turn it on.