It suggests that greenhouse growers should evaluate their production costs to determine if adjustments need to be made to stay competitive. Michigan State University Extension has developed a set of free software to help evaluate greenhouse businesses from a financial perspective. ‘Estimating the Production Costs of Greenhouse Crops’ is a spreadsheet-type of software tool that allows growers to use their records to estimate their production costs and explore opportunities for cost savings.

The blank spreadsheet for up to 100 crops, an example spreadsheet and an auto-tutorial video are now located on the MSU Farm Information Resource Management (FIRM) website under Budgets, Cost of Production and Decision Making Tools. Scroll down the page to the ‘Fruit, Vegetable, Nursery, Orchard, Greenhouse’ section and the spreadsheets and video will be located there.

Using MSU’s spreadsheet designed to run with Microsoft Excel 97 or later, growers can input current costs from tax returns, invoices and quotes to estimate cost of production and project sale prices on a per plant basis for each enterprise. The spreadsheet was designed to provide adequate flexibility to enable individual greenhouses to use it for their specific operation and has ten interlinked worksheets.

Source: Michigan State University Extension