Looking up the soybean break-even price to judge a buyer’s offer? It is two numbers, and the distance between them changes the answer. Call them floors: the lowest price at which a sale covers a given set of costs. Take a rented acre of central Illinois soybeans. The 2025 budget of farmdoc, the University of Illinois farm economics service, written in September 2024, works out to a first floor of $6.53 a bushel for the cost of growing the crop. With the rent counted, the second floor is $11.05. The 2025 crop sold at $10.24. So before you sell, write your farm’s two floors, with what went into each and the date, and compare every offer with both.
Why isn’t the soybean break-even price one number?
Because the cost per bushel changes with the cost lines you count, and two of those sums are worth writing. The break-even price is the cost of an acre divided by the bushels you expect from it. Below it, a sale does not cover that cost.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), which advises governments on how to measure farm costs, calculates the break-even price on all costs in its Handbook on Agricultural Cost of Production Statistics. It notes that the price covering only the cash spent is worth working out too.
One example in that handbook, a study of small maize farmers in Zambia, splits the cost into three levels. They are “total cash expenditures; total cash expenditure plus household labour and owned assets (excluding land); and total cost including land cost”. Each level answers a different question about the same sale.
The farmdoc budgets draw their first line in another place: at non-land costs, which already count machinery depreciation and hired labor. To follow the reasoning, take a central Illinois farm on cash-rented, high-productivity land. In September 2024 it writes its two 2025 soybean floors from farmdoc’s figures, as if they were its own.
Open one sheet per crop with two columns: the cost of growing the crop, and all costs with the land.
What does each floor tell you about an offer?
Above the first floor, the sale pays for growing the crop. Above the second, it pays for the land as well. Between the two, the crop pays its way and the land does not.
The 2025 Illinois budgets read their figures the same way. What is left after non-land costs is the “return to both farmer and land”; take out the land cost, and what remains is the farmer’s own return.
In the example, the 2025 crop sold at an average of $10.24 a bushel. That is $3.71 above the first floor and 81 cents below the second: the season’s growing costs were paid, and part of the rent was not.
Compare every offer with both floors, and write beside it the date and who made it, because a floor only helps against an offer you can look up later. See how to keep a price record.
What goes in each column, and why isn’t your neighbor’s floor yours?
Because the same line is a cost on one farm and missing on the next. A 2022 study of Czech farm accounts shows the mechanism. The usual farm income figure counts wages, rent and interest paid, and “does not take into account the costs of unpaid labor, the owned land, and the equity capital”.
A neighbor who rents has a rent line. A farmer who owns the ground has none, and that floor comes out lower only because there is no rent to count. In the example, the rent is $4.52 of the $11.05.
Sources also draw the first column differently. The Illinois budgets count machinery and hired labor in the first floor. The 2025 Purdue Crop Cost and Return Guide leaves them for later. Its contribution margin is the income left after the costs that vary with the crop, and it “is used to cover overhead costs such as machinery ownership costs, family and hired labor, and cash rent”.
If you rent, the rent leaves your bank account this season, like the seed does. Farmdoc still counts it with the land, in the second floor. Do the same, so your floors stay comparable with farmdoc’s and from one season to the next.
At the head of each column, write the rule for what goes in it. Settle with your accountant whether what the family draws to live on counts as a cost, and whether owned land gets a rent charge at what it would fetch rented out.
What do you divide by?
By the yield you expect, and a yield is a choice, like every cost line. The FAO handbook runs the sum the other way: total costs divided by the expected price give the “minimum yield required to cover all costs”. A yield written too high lowers the floor on paper and puts no extra grain in the bin.
Write the yield you used on the sheet, and where it came from.
What was left out?
Payments that arrive without a sale, such as support payments and insurance payouts; the cost of holding grain after harvest; and grain that never sells. Each one changes what you end up with, and none shows up as a cost line. The 2026 Illinois Crop Budgets say so of their own figures: “These break-even price calculations do not include other revenues such as support payments.”
The example farm’s real 2025 season shows why. Costs moved during the season, and so did the floors, as the figures farmdoc published in September 2026 shows.
Holding grain after harvest adds interest and handling every month, and shrink, the grain lost in storage, leaves fewer bushels to divide by. That is why what a month of storage costs is worked out per bushel and per month. The FAO handbook also divides only by what can be sold: “the production unit should reflect only the marketable output by excluding waste”.
Under the two floors, list what was left out, with one reason for each.
Who signs the sheet, and when is it redone?
Whoever made it, with the date, and it is rebuilt every season by the same rule. The FAO handbook asks that the method chosen to count unpaid family work be applied consistently, because “consistency, transparency and regularity in the application of the chosen method” is what makes estimates comparable across time.
The Purdue guide ends by encouraging farmers “to create crop budgets and, in general, improve their record-keeping”. A sheet with no name cannot be questioned later, because nobody can say who decided what went into each line.
A written selling plan and a three-year budget both need a cost to start from, and the second floor is the one that counts every cost. A written selling plan keeps every price on it above that floor. The price a three-year budget assumes is built from projected total costs over expected yield. Before planting, the profit per acre you write down starts from the same lines.
File the sheet where whoever takes the buyer’s call can open it without asking anyone.
Where to start
Two to three hours, with last season’s invoices and the lease on the table. Write the first sheet for the crop you sell next.
The same sheet works for cattle, with a weaned calf in place of a bushel. A 2025 review of cow-calf research lists break-even analysis among the methods used on farms. Writing one figure, checking every offer against it and rebuilding it each season is farm management applied to a single number.