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.

Sweet Corn Planning Budget (G734), 1 acre with overhead irrigation — University of Missouri Extension, 2025. Open the source. Printed total $3,525.41/acre. The printed lines add to about $13 more than the printed operating total; the budget notes totals may not sum due to rounding. In today's prices this budget would run about $3,525–$3,704/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$171
Fertilizer and lime
Seed and transplants$157
Seed
Crop protection$229
Herbicide
Insecticide
Water and pumping$176
Irrigation fuel and oil
Irrigation repairs and maintenance
Irrigation system ownership · fixed
Labor$1,206
Labor
Fuel and machinery$126
Machinery fuel, repair and maintenance
Machinery ownership · fixed
Other inputs$1,170
Packaging
Marketing (10% of sales)
Miscellaneous
Land and overhead$303
Interest on operating capital
Land · fixed
Your totals
Variable cost / acre$3,185
Fixed cost / acre$353
Total cost / acre$3,538
Total for 1 acre$3,538

Sales / acre$4,986
Left after costs / acre$1,448
Breakeven price$1.97 per dozen ears

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: Sweet corn (fresh market, overhead irrigation) in Missouri

Built from real yield records of Missouri 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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