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.

Sample fresh-market tomato budget (Tomato Production) — 2006 — Penn State Extension, 2006 · from Pennsylvania. Open the source. Publication last updated September 2006, so costs are well below today's. Fixed cost is the printed $10,387.70 total minus printed variable costs. This university printed only subtotals, so the lines below are its subtotals, not individual items. In today's prices this budget would run about $22,245–$23,957/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$9,951
Interest on operating capital (as printed)
Other budget lines not itemized here (reconciles to the published total)
Land and overhead$437
Fixed and ownership costs (printed total, not itemized) · fixed
Your totals
Variable cost / acre$9,951
Fixed cost / acre$437
Total cost / acre$10,388
Total for 1 acre$10,388
Sales / acre$11,000
Left after costs / acre$612
Breakeven price$20.78 per 25-lb carton

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: Fresh-market tomato in Pennsylvania

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