Crop production budgets
Explore source-reported per-acre operations, compare five Imperial County crop scenarios, and test your own cost assumptions.
Adjust the assumptions
Percentage changes are your scenario assumptions, applied to itemized operations only. Cash overhead is recalculated as 15% of adjusted growing costs plus baseline land rent. Harvest scales independently. Acreage scales totals linearly; no economies of scale, price or revenue are modeled.
Compare crops
Baseline USD per acre, not adjusted by the scenario controls. Crops use different yields and practices; cost alone does not establish profitability.
All baseline rows reconcile: itemized operations + land rent + cash overhead = source-reported all-in. The circular excludes management fees, loans, supervision, return on investment, road/ditch maintenance and perimeter weed control.
What the math check found
Every explicit rate/material/labor row was recalculated, with three per-crop lump-sum rows accepted as source estimates. Section totals, 15% overhead, 25 profit/loss cells and five break-even values per crop were checked against the original spreadsheet. Printed circular totals agree at displayed-cent precision; spreadsheet half-cent formulas are rounded only after the full sum.
The old MuniGraph dataset omitted the $106.50 watermelon phosphate row, and our first preview hid land rent and overhead in an unexplained residual. Both are corrected. Verified watermelon itemized operations are $15,356, not $15,249.50.
Where the figures come from
Canonical source: Mark’s original UC Cooperative Extension Imperial County “Vegetable Crops Sample Production Costs 2025” spreadsheet, cross-checked against his scanned “Guidelines to Production Costs and Practices, Imperial County, 2025 Vegetable Crops,” Circular 104-V. The scans are library copies dated November 2024, not downloads from UC Davis. The budget is spreadsheet sheet , circular PDF page . The old MuniGraph repository was an initial lead; its app code was not reused.
UC Davis Cost & Return Studies is a different publication. This data core preserves native phases and lines. Cross-state categories such as seed, fertilizer, chemicals, irrigation, labor, machinery, land and overhead require verified component mapping; combined source rows are not silently split.