Commodity Costs and Returns

Cost and return estimates are reported for the United States and major production regions for corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, grain sorghum, rice, peanuts, oats, barley, milk, hogs, and cow-calf. The history of commodity cost and return estimates for the U.S. and regions is divided into three categories: Current, Recent, and Historical estimates. Cost-of Production Forecasts are also available for major U.S. field crops.

Note: The procedure used to update the opportunity cost of land in all crop production cost and return accounts was changed in the October 1, 2013 update. Changes in cropland cash rents, reported by the National Agricultural Statistics Service, were used to adjust the land cost from the survey to the update year. This procedure is an improvement over changes in the general land cash rent index that was previously used. The new procedure was implemented for the land cost estimate of each commodity from the most recent survey year of the commodity through the most recent update. 

Also see the ERS Milk Cost of Production Estimates data product.

NEW! Commodity Costs and Returns data for crops are now available in pivot tables and machine-readable sheets, in addition to the “current”, “recent”, and “historical” data files.