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.

2008 Maryland Vegetable Enterprise Budgets: Cabbage — Per Acre — University of Maryland Extension, 2008. Open the source. Printed total cost $4,431.04/acre. Variable total $4,118.04 includes 7% interest on operating capital. At the budget's own price and yield this crop shows a $431/acre loss — the document says so itself. Fixed costs use custom hire rates as a proxy for field operation costs. 2008 dollars. In today's prices this budget would run about $7,674–$8,041/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$399
Nitrogen, phosphate, potash
Lime and amendments$23
Lime
Seed and transplants$840
Plants (20,000)
Cover crop
Crop protection$56
Herbicides (Dual Magnum, Goal)
Insecticides (Warrior, Dipel, SpinTor)
Water and pumping$120
Irrigation (3 applications) · fixed
Labor$1,575
Harvest and packing labor (225 hr)
Fuel and machinery$128
Field operations at custom rates (plowing, disking, planting, spraying) · fixed
Other inputs$1,087
Soil test
50-lb crates (800)
Land and overhead$204
Interest on operating capital (7%)
Land charge · fixed
Your totals
Variable cost / acre$4,118
Fixed cost / acre$313
Total cost / acre$4,431
Total for 1 acre$4,431

Sales / acre$4,000
Left after costs / acre$-431
Breakeven price$0.11 per pound

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: Cabbage (fresh market) in Maryland

Built from real yield records of Maryland 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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