Farm Economics: Production Costs, Input Prices and Land Rents

What official statistics say about the cost side of farming — and what they do not say.

Four datasets from two statistical agencies underlie this page: USDA’s cost-of-production forecasts for nine field crops, and Eurostat’s farm input price indices, input purchase prices and agricultural land rents. Together they carry 24,916 figures.

The hard part is not gathering them. It is keeping each one as the kind of statement its source made. A forecast for a year that has not finished, an average across every farm in a country, and an index measuring movement against a base year are three different things, and a page that lined them up in one column would turn all three into a fourth thing that none of them is.

These are what official and public sources estimate, not what any particular farm spent. A national average, a forecast and a price index are three different kinds of statement, and none of them describes an individual business.

Figures: 24,916
Datasets: 4
Crops with costs: 9
Margins published: 0

What this page does not publish

The three figures a reader most often wants are the three no source here supports. Every one of them needs revenue, and not one of these datasets carries any.

Gross margin: Requires revenue. Nothing here carries any, and a margin computed from a cost dataset plus an assumed price is a scenario presented as a result.
Net return, or profit: Requires revenue and a full cost basis together. Calling a gross margin a profit is the most common error in farm economics writing and this layer will not make it.
Break-even price: Total cost divided by expected output. No source here publishes an expected yield to divide by, and a calculator that asked the reader for one would be computing their number rather than a source’s.

Three kinds of figure, kept apart

observednone held: No dataset of actual farm accounts is ingested. Farm accountancy networks hold them and publish aggregates rather than the accounts themselves, so what would arrive is a survey average, not an observation.
survey-average11,060 figures
enterprise-budgetnone held: Public enterprise budgets are published by universities and extension services, overwhelmingly as PDFs with their assumptions in prose. A budget whose assumptions could not be carried with it would be a set of numbers detached from the scenario that produced them.
modelednone held: Reserved for a model output that is not a forecast of a future year. The ERS figures are forecasts and are typed as such; nothing else here is modelled.
index13,550 figures
forecast306 figures

An index measures how far a price has moved from its base year. It carries no currency and is not an amount of money.

Cost of production, by crop

United States national forecasts. A forecast of what a crop will cost to grow is not a record of what it cost. It is the source’s expectation for a year that has not finished.

Crop	Year	Total costs listed	Basis
barley	2027	537.08 USD	Dollars per planted acre
cotton	2027	1000.66 USD	Dollars per planted acre
groundnut	2027	1247.94 USD	Dollars per planted acre
maize	2027	952.09 USD	Dollars per planted acre
oats	2027	532.48 USD	Dollars per planted acre
rice	2027	1426.87 USD	Dollars per planted acre
sorghum	2027	476.66 USD	Dollars per planted acre
soybean	2027	701.48 USD	Dollars per planted acre
wheat	2027	427.96 USD	Dollars per planted acre

These are the source’s own totals. AgricultureID does not add the cost items up to produce one, because the source decides what belongs in a total and a recomputed figure would disagree with it for definitional reasons that would read as an error.

Where the figures are about

Eurostat publishes union aggregates, countries and regions inside countries in a single column. They are counted separately here, because a region is not a small country and a union total is not a country either.

subnational: 236
country: 29
union: 1

Datasets, and what each is entitled to say

USDA ERS commodity cost-of-production forecasts

forecast306 figures

ERS publishes cost-of-production forecasts by commodity with its own item breakdown and its own totals.

Geography:: United States, national. ERS publishes no state or regional breakdown in this series, so no figure here is about a particular place inside the country.
Money:: USD, exactly as published; no conversion is applied
Assumes:: The figures are for a year that has not finished; ERS marks them 2026F and 2027F.
They are national estimates for the United States as a whole, not for a state, a region or a farm.
They are costs only. The dataset carries no returns, so no margin can be computed from it.

Source: USDA ERS Data Products · USDA ERS Data Products

Eurostat agricultural input price indices

index13,550 figures

Published as a nominal and a real series on a stated base year. Both are ingested as published and neither is derived here.

Geography:: EU member states and the EU aggregate. The union figure is a weighted aggregate published by Eurostat, not a number this corpus computed from the member states.
Money:: none — an index carries a base year, not a currency

Source: Eurostat — Agriculture database · Eurostat — Agriculture database

Eurostat purchase prices of the means of agricultural production

survey-average6,164 figures

Collected by national authorities to a common methodology and published as averages.

Geography:: EU member states. Each figure is a national average for the reporting country; no sub-national breakdown is published in this series.
Money:: EUR, NAC, exactly as published; no conversion is applied

Source: Eurostat — Agriculture database · Eurostat — Agriculture database

Eurostat agricultural land renting prices

survey-average4,896 figures

Regional averages for the land types the source distinguishes, published per hectare in euro and in national currency.

Geography:: EU member states and NUTS regions inside them. This is the only series here with sub-national figures, and a NUTS region is a region, never a small country.
Money:: EUR, NAC, exactly as published; no conversion is applied

Source: Eurostat — Agriculture database · Eurostat — Agriculture database

Currency and inflation

Figures appear in the currency the source published them in. Eurostat’s NAC series are in each reporting country’s national currency and its EUR series are in euro; both are carried as published. No figure is converted between currencies here, and no historical amount is restated in today’s money. A conversion needs a rate and a date, an inflation adjustment needs a deflator and a base, and inventing either would change what the source said while looking like a courtesy.