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.

Sweetpotato — 2025 — NC State Extension — Agricultural & Resource Economics, 2025. Open the source. Fixed cost excludes the budget's separate 7% general overhead line ($192.20/ac). In today's prices this budget would run about $3,165–$3,340/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$239
Fertilizer and lime (ammonium sulfate, superphosphate, potash, lime)
Seed and transplants$590
Seed roots
Cover crop
Crop protection$290
Fumigant
Herbicide
Insecticide
Labor$886
Field labor (transplanting, weeding, tractor)
Harvest labor
Fuel and machinery$213
Tractor and machinery
Other inputs$528
Crop consulting
Storage
Transportation
Interest on operating capital
Land and overhead$419
Fixed and ownership costs (printed total, not itemized) · fixed
Your totals
Variable cost / acre$2,746
Fixed cost / acre$419
Total cost / acre$3,165
Total for 1 acre$3,165
Sales / acre$4,660
Left after costs / acre$1,495
Breakeven price$7.91 per 50-lb bushel

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: Sweetpotato in North Carolina

Built from real yield records of North Carolina 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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