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.
2022 Sample Budget for Large-Scale Bell Pepper Production — Per Acre — University of Tennessee Extension, 2022. Open the source. Printed total cost $19,933.29/acre ($19,374.38 variable including 4.35% operating interest, $558.91 fixed). The budget's own breakeven is $14.78 a box or 1,037 boxes an acre. Water cost is listed as $0. Version without the plastic-bed fumigation option. In today's prices this budget would run about $21,731–$23,075/acre (USDA farm-input price index, 2025 average to August 2026; farm wages brought up separately with USDA's farm wage rates).
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: Bell pepper (green, staked, plastic mulch) in Tennessee
Built from real yield records of Tennessee 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 Tennessee? Add your records to these benchmarks in Settings → Privacy → Data sharing. It's off unless you turn it on.