I’ve long assumed that it is more expensive to grow vegetables at home compared to buying from the grocery store. I do it for other reasons, I tell myself. I feel rich having food growing around the house, I like getting my hands in the dirt, it’s fun to send friends home with some produce after they visit, and I know what’s in and on the food I eat from the yard.
However, I realized that I’ve never actually done the math. Thomas Sowell spurred the thought — I’m reading his great book, “Basic Economics.” Where are the hard facts? as he asks.
At a couple of grocery stores I noted prices on broccoli, which is what we happen to have a lot of in the yard at the moment. At Albertson’s, it was $2 per pound. I weighed a small head and a large head, and they were 0.75 and 1.75 pounds respectively. Therefore, a small head would cost $1.50 and a large head $3.50. Then I checked prices at Whole Foods. They didn’t have heads of broccoli, but they were selling bunches of about ten side shoots each for $3. The bunches were about the same size as a medium head, so let’s think of it as $3 for a medium head at Whole Foods.
That’s the cost of broccoli at the store; now what does it cost me to produce broccoli at home? This year, I started some from seed and some as transplants bought at a nursery, but for simplicity’s sake let’s only use the cost of the transplants, which were $3 for a six-pack, or $0.50 per plant.
The plants needed water. But since they were grown during our rainy season the water inputs were small. I planted on September 19, and then I irrigated a total of 18 times before the rains became consistent enough to make irrigation unnecessary, and I began harvesting in December. The total irrigation per plant before December was about eight gallons, costing me $0.06.
How about labor? In addition to planting the seedlings, I added compost to the soil surface, and I programmed the automatic irrigation system. I actually never had to weed because the beds I grew the broccoli in have been well cared for in the past. And then I harvested. Per plant, the total work might have taken four minutes. (Important note here: I encountered zero pest damage this year even though last year I lost some broccoli plants to rabbits and later in the season some plants suffered aphid damage. But let’s just talk about this year’s facts.) What was my four minutes of labor worth? I could’ve been teaching, where I make about $30 per hour, in which case four minutes to me is worth $2.
Adding up all the costs, we have $0.50 for a seedling, $0.06 for water, $2 for labor, and I’d like to estimate $0.20 for irrigation infrastructure and compost. Total cost: $2.76 per broccoli plant.
Again, I found that a small head at the store cost $1.50 and a large head cost $3.50, but broccoli plants grown in the yard produce much more than just a single head of any size. Mine were the variety ‘Premium Crop’, and they produced two to three medium-sized heads plus side shoots for months thereafter. (It’s mid-February and I’m still harvesting side shoots galore.)
‘Premium Crop’ side shoots galore
I’d estimate I got a retail value of $7 to $10 out of each plant.
By these calculations I’m ahead a minimum of $4.24 per plant. And that really surprises me. While it surely varies year to year and plant to plant, this year homegrown broccoli is not just cleaner and fresher than broccoli from the store, but more economical as well.
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That’s fascinating! How about land cost? That’s not free. I suppose you could argue that you would have the land whether you grew something there or not. I think that would be an interesting fact to throw into the mix.
Right. There are a number of costs that I intentionally left out because they’re difficult to quantify — one being land — even though they are real costs nonetheless. You also have the cost of the intellectual capital I’ve developed over the years to know when and how to grow the broccoli. I’ve spent time in trial and error, I’ve purchased and read books, etc.
But there are also benefits I left out, benefits that people pay for at the grocery store or farmer’s market every day, such as what I alluded to in my description of the broccoli being cleaner. People pay more for broccoli labeled “organic” because they think it’s healthier for their bodies, or better for the environment, or generally purer in other inarticulated ways. My homegrown broccoli is beyond this legal term “organic” in that it has been sprayed with nothing but water, for example. It has no residues of the legal “organic” pesticides that can be used on broccoli such as nicotine sulfate or rotenone. How much would people pay for that? I don’t know.
The funny thing about land cost is that we’re talking homegrown broccoli here, meaning grown on the land that surrounds the house. And in terms of the cost of this land and house together, the land was inconsequential. What I mean is, it was the size and quality of the house on the land that mostly determined the price we paid for the property as a whole. I was probably the only prospective buyer who put his hands in the dirt to gauge its texture and noticed the amount of sunlight reaching different parts of the property.
Thanks for the economics lesson. I always worried about my vegetables being much more expensive to grow compared to store bought. However, I tend to spend much more time in my garden then 4 minutes per plants X all the plants.
That is OK, I like that time spent that way.
The next economics lesson is to see if the commercial scale agricultural/farmer is making a decent profit. They make much less than the store per pound of vegetables. Their land cost is property tax plus mortgage…etc. Then there are the testing costs often required by state laws. I wonder how a small commercial farmer can survive !
Hi Duane,
You’re so right. I was just listening to an interview with a farmer who said that in his area (near Davis, CA) tomato farmers get three and a half cents per pound for what they sell to a cannery. Then consumers buy a can of tomatoes for about a dollar. His point was that the profit margin is not with the farmer.
I liked your broccoli and avocado economics posts. Have you ever done one for your whole garden? I estimate that we grow $2000-$3000 in fruit (avocado, figs, tangerines, oranges, bananas, cherries, pineapple guavas, cherimoya, blueberries) and veggies (summer and winter gardens) each year and have fun and get exercise doing it! Compare this to most hobbies, which you might spend that much on gear, lessons, etc.
We also get a lot of nurturing joy by growing a garden, so much that we don’t feel the need to have pets. Thus nurturing our plant babies saves us money versus the fur babies that many people spend lots of money on. Plus you don’t have to pick up poop and get hit with surprise $1000 vet bills! (ok we both got the plant gene not the dog gene I’ll admit).
There is also the environmental benefit beyond no pesticides. The carbon footprint of eating food grown hyper-locally is much smaller than produce being trucked or flown thousands of miles to get on our plates.
I was never able to grow enough Broccoli to meet the demand at the dinner table nor did my garden variety taste any better than what I could get from the supermarket. It is however a beautiful plant and I do enjoy watching it mature from seed to flower.