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.

Michigan Cabbage Cost of Production 2024 (Bulletin E-3532), fresh market — Michigan State University Extension, 2024. Open the source. Printed total $7,692/acre at 700 boxes, including harvest, boxes, cooling and a $200 management allowance; overhead (irrigation, land, insurance and other fixed costs) is $823/acre. The study itemizes pre-harvest work by task; here the pre-harvest costs other than transplants are one combined line. In today's prices this budget would run about $8,262–$8,754/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
Seed and transplants$613
Transplants (17,500 plants at $7 per flat of 200)
Labor$1,820
Hand harvest labor, field supervision and transfer to cooler ($2.60/box)
Other inputs$4,437
Soil prep, fertilizer, weeding, crop protection, crop insurance and management (study total less transplants and harvest)
Boxes ($3.00/box)
Cooling (1 cent per lb)
Land and overhead$823
Fixed and ownership costs (printed total, not itemized) · fixed
Your totals
Variable cost / acre$6,869
Fixed cost / acre$823
Total cost / acre$7,692
Total for 1 acre$7,692
Sales / acre$7,700
Left after costs / acre$8
Breakeven price$10.99 per 56-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: Fresh-market cabbage in Michigan

Built from real yield records of Michigan 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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