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.

Eastern Broccoli Production Enterprise Budgets (EB 2020-12) — Western New York, 2020 — Cornell University — Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, 2020. Open the source. Western New York. Fixed cost here is the printed $627 fixed plus $472 overhead (printed total $5,784). Price not shown here. This university printed only subtotals, so the lines below are its subtotals, not individual items. In today's prices this budget would run about $8,097–$8,720/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
Other inputs$4,685
Interest on operating capital, 7% (as printed)
Other budget lines not itemized here (reconciles to the published total)
Land and overhead$1,099
Fixed and ownership costs (printed total, not itemized) · fixed
Your totals
Variable cost / acre$4,685
Fixed cost / acre$1,099
Total cost / acre$5,784
Total for 1 acre$5,784
Sales / acreEnter a price
Left after costs / acre—
Breakeven price$12.85 per 21-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: Broccoli in New York

Built from real yield records of New York 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 New York? Add your records to these benchmarks in Settings → Privacy → Data sharing. It's off unless you turn it on.