Seed catalogs open, penciling out next season's shares
Set a weekly share value against your own market prices, choose your weeks, and see the season price, how many members break even, and what each one leaves toward overhead. Everything stays in your browser.
The season
Your costs
The standing order
The numbers here are yours to check. This page does arithmetic on what you type — it cannot see your recipe, your equipment or your batch.
For anything you will eat or sell as food, double-check it against your own process and your local rules. This page does maths, not food safety.
Want it to remember?
In MadeKeeper, the inputs each share consumes draw down your real inventory week by week, and season revenue and per-member margin land in the ledger under the share price you set here. See for market gardens & farmstands or poke around the live demo. $19/mo for the whole back office, kept for as long as you stay. The shop stays free for cost a piece and one fair — no product cap. The tax packet, Etsy and Square, and more fairs are the $19.
Free calculator · Market garden & CSA
The math is short — the arguments are about what goes into it. Here is how each argument runs, and which calls stay yours.
How do I price a CSA share?
Start with a weekly share value and multiply by your season length: $30 a week for 20 weeks is a $600 share. The weekly number is a convention, not a formula — the honest anchor is what the same basket would cost at your own market stand, so a member never feels like they prepaid for produce that never showed up. Season length is a convention too: 20 weeks is the default here, but your climate and your crop plan decide it, not the calculator.
How many members do I need to break even?
Divide your total season costs by the season price per share and round up, because nobody sells a fraction of a share. If the season will cost $14,400 to grow and a share sells for $600, you need 24 members before anything is profit. The rounding matters at farm scale — 23 members would leave you $600 short.
Why doesn't my own labor count in the per-share cost?
By default it stays out, and that is a deliberate setting, not an oversight: your time is what the margin is supposed to pay, so folding a wage into cost double-counts it and makes every share look like a loser. Budgeting yourself a wage is a fair way to plan too — which is why it is a toggle, and the result always says which way it was computed. Either answer is honest as long as you know which one you are looking at.
What counts as the cost of one share — and what's my margin?
The direct inputs a share consumes: seed, amendments, packaging. Enter that and the margin appears — a $600 share carrying $180 of inputs leaves $420 per member toward overhead and labor. The arguable part is at the edges — whether a cost belongs to one season's shares or to the whole farm — and that line is yours to draw; the calculator computes whichever version of the number you give it.