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.

Pumpkins (CCD-CP-114) — 2017-18 budget — University of Kentucky — Center for Crop Diversification, 2018 · from Kentucky. Open the source. Drip-irrigated on black plastic. Fixed cost is the printed ~$3,745 total minus the two printed subtotals. At $0.12/lb this budget loses money. This university printed only subtotals, so the lines below are its subtotals, not individual items. In today's prices this budget would run about $5,184–$5,366/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$2,040
Harvest and marketing (as printed)
Other inputs$1,200
Production costs (as printed)
Land and overhead$505
Fixed and ownership costs (printed total, not itemized) · fixed
Your totals
Variable cost / acre$3,240
Fixed cost / acre$505
Total cost / acre$3,745
Total for 1 acre$3,745
Sales / acre$3,600
Left after costs / acre$-145
Breakeven price$0.12 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: Pumpkin 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.