Did you know that over one-third of U.S. households participate in food gardening, and that the most common foods produced are vegetables? There are a lot of different motivations for gardening including personal enjoyment, reducing food expenses, and knowing where food comes from. Purchasing food from a grocery store or other producer is fairly straightforward- you pay $X amount and receive Y good in return. When gardening for food production, determining your cost of production is less straightforward than this. A solid understanding of how to estimate costs and savings from your vegetable garden can help you decide what to produce and how to budget.
There are several frameworks available on the internet to help you estimate the costs of vegetable gardening, and it’s important to note a few things as you get started. First and foremost, many of these budgets will not account for the labor, time, and effort you put in to maintaining the garden. The “value” or “cost” associated with your own time is subjective- and you have to decide if the benefit of gardening is worth the time and effort to do so. Second, be sure to include all of the costs associated with your garden- try not to leave anything out, which can make the cost estimate lower than the actual expenses. Also recognize that most budgets are going to account for a single vegetable type at a time, and are going to consider cost breakdown over time- so be sure to consider how many years of use you may get out of a resource. For example, consider expenses like equipment, soil amendments, fertilizer, lime, seeds or seedling plants, hand tools, pest management equipment, irrigation and water equipment, and so on and so forth. Some of these things will be annual costs- like fertilizer and seeds, and others, like equipment or insecticides may be usable for several years. The more accurate you can be with your costs, the more accurate your overall budget will be.
There are three main factors that will influence your costs savings. First, consider the costs or expenses associated with getting started. If you already have a producing garden, you may have lower expenses than someone starting from scratch. Second, consider the size of your harvest and how much you produce. It may seem like your home-produced vegetables are more expensive than store bought, but you might be producing more of them than you would typically purchase, which influences your overall budget. Finally, consider the price and amount you would purchase from a store compared to what you produce on your own. If you produce vegetables you would not purchase or don’t use, obviously you’re not going to be saving much money on them. On the flip side, if you can produce enough of the vegetables you purchase in large quantities, it may result in some savings. An example expense list would break down the materials, their original cost, the # of years they can be used and an annual cost (original cost/years of use). Those annual costs can be summed to give a total materials cost per year for the entire garden, and can be broken down by crop. For example, if 50% of your garden is tomatoes, you could divide your annual cost by 50% to give the total cost of your tomato plants. Another useful value to have is to weight the amount of vegetables you produce- in this case, how many lbs of tomatoes did your garden make? If you divide the total cost of your tomato plants by the pounds produced, you get the total cost per pound tomatoes produced. This value can then be compared to the amount you would pay at the grocery store, and you can see if you saved any money.
It can be useful to develop a budget for your garden- at the very least, it allows you to evaluate your total cost of production for your vegetables, and at best, it can help you accomplish some of your production goals. If you need help developing a budget, let us know at uge3181@uga.edu or 706-359-3233.
