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.

Irrigated Watermelon Enterprise Budget, Seedless Variety Type — Sample, 2024 — Oklahoma State University Extension, 2024. Open the source. Printed total cost $5,276.42/acre ($4,718.03 operating, $558.39 fixed). Sales are 30,000 lb of seedless at $0.16 plus 15,000 lb of the seeded pollinizer at $0.11 ($6,450 total); the price shown is the blended $0.143/lb. Land cost is entered as $0, so add rent if you lease. OSU's own breakeven above total costs is $0.121/lb on the seedless yield alone. In today's prices this budget would run about $5,611–$5,877/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$61
Fertilizer
Seed and transplants$595
Transplants (1,450)
Crop protection$135
Disease control
Insect control
Weed control
Water and pumping$39
Irrigation fuel, lube, repair
Labor$2,102
Transplant labor
Hoeing and pruning labor
Harvesting and marketing
Machinery and irrigation labor
Fuel and machinery$583
Machinery fuel, lube, repair
Machinery and irrigation interest · fixed
Depreciation · fixed
Other inputs$1,684
Other expense (not itemized by OSU)
Land and overhead$78
Operating capital interest (8.5%)
Taxes and insurance on equipment · fixed
Your totals
Variable cost / acre$4,718
Fixed cost / acre$558
Total cost / acre$5,276
Total for 1 acre$5,276
Sales / acre$6,449
Left after costs / acre$1,172
Breakeven price$0.12 per lb

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: Watermelon (irrigated, seedless with seeded pollinizer) in Oklahoma

Built from real yield records of Oklahoma 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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