Estimating wholesale cost of nursery production tools available online
Print
EmailFree nursery cost of production spreadsheets will help growers estimate production costs and explore opportunities for cost savings.
Nursery growers should evaluate their production costs and plant inventory to determine if adjustments need to be made to stay competitive. To accomplish this, growers need to have a good handle on their costs. Michigan State University Extension has developed a set of free software to help you evaluate your nursery business from a financial perspective. “Estimating the Wholesale Cost of Nursery Production” is a spreadsheet-type of software tool that allows you to use your records to estimate your production costs and explore opportunities for cost savings.
The two blank spreadsheets (25 and 50 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 our spreadsheet designed to run with Microsoft Excel, 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 nurseries to use it for their specific operation. The spreadsheet has 10 interlinked worksheets.
A 100 crop enterprise spreadsheet should be added to the FIRM website later this month.
For additional assistance, please contact me at dudek@anr.msu.edu or 616-994-4542.
