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 Retail Sweet Corn Production Budget (hand harvested) — Ohio State University Extension — Farm Office, 2008 · from Ohio. Open the source. 2008 budget. Variable costs leave out the operator's own labor and management, so true cost is higher. Printed total $768.50. This university printed only subtotals, so the lines below are its subtotals, not individual items. In today's prices this budget would run about $1,282–$1,381/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$377
Other budget lines not itemized here (reconciles to the published total)
Land and overhead$392
Fixed and ownership costs (printed total, not itemized) · fixed
Your totals
Variable cost / acre$377
Fixed cost / acre$392
Total cost / acre$769
Total for 1 acre$769
Sales / acre$3,900
Left after costs / acre$3,131
Breakeven price$0.59 per dozen

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 (retail, hand-harvested) in Ohio

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