A land grant university publishes a planning budget for microgreens. In it, one harvested 1020 tray of pea microgreens brings $32.00, costs $25.42 and nets $6.58. The seed line in that column is $0.38. At the budget’s own seed price, thirty eight cents buys 0.79 ounces of pea seed for a tray that commercial growers sow with seven to nine ounces. Here is the whole tray, line by line, what each line is tied to, and what happens to the bottom line when the one broken number gets fixed.
What a harvested tray costs
The budget is G693 from University of Missouri Extension, written by Manita Ale and Juan Cabrera-Garcia, revised July 2024, built on March 2024 price forecasts. It assumes a greenhouse, a stainless steel shelf unit with four levels, and four 1020 trays of a single crop per level. Everything below is dollars per harvested tray.
| Line | Mix | Broccoli | Cabbage | Pea | Radish |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sales | 46.00 | 46.00 | 60.00 | 32.00 | 32.00 |
| Seed | 1.04 | 1.04 | 4.00 | 0.38 | 2.00 |
| Growing media | 3.00 | 3.00 | 3.00 | 3.00 | 3.00 |
| Fertilizer | 0.07 | 0.07 | 0.07 | 0.07 | 0.07 |
| Electricity | 1.20 | 1.20 | 0.98 | 1.20 | 0.83 |
| Labor | 5.00 | 5.00 | 5.00 | 5.00 | 5.00 |
| Labels | 6.60 | 6.60 | 9.00 | 4.80 | 4.80 |
| Packages | 4.62 | 4.62 | 6.30 | 3.36 | 3.36 |
| Marketing | 6.90 | 6.90 | 9.00 | 4.80 | 4.80 |
| Repairs | 0.41 | 0.38 | 0.30 | 0.35 | 0.24 |
| Operating interest | 1.23 | 1.22 | 1.60 | 0.98 | 1.02 |
| Operating costs | 30.06 | 30.03 | 39.26 | 23.93 | 25.13 |
| Ownership costs | 1.74 | 1.61 | 1.29 | 1.48 | 1.03 |
| Total costs | 31.80 | 31.64 | 40.55 | 25.42 | 26.16 |
| Income over total costs | 14.20 | 14.36 | 19.45 | 6.58 | 5.84 |
First thing worth noticing: seed is the smallest cost in four of the five columns. Labels, packages and marketing together run $16.12 on the mix tray, against $1.04 of seed. The crop you pick barely moves the cost side. Buyers price it the same way, which is the finding behind the per-ounce price benchmarks. What you do after the cut moves it a lot.
Which lines follow the tray and which follow the yield
This distinction decides whether a number in that table is safe to reuse. Three lines are tied to how much you harvest, and they scale with it.
- Labels, $0.60 each. The pea tray yields 8 ounces and carries $4.80 in labels, so the budget packs one ounce per clamshell and prints one label per pack.
- Packages, $0.42 each. Same arithmetic: $3.36 divided by 8 ounces.
- Marketing, 15% of sales. Sell more, pay more.
Four lines stay flat no matter what comes off the tray: growing media at $3.00, fertilizer at $0.07, labor at 15 minutes per tray, and electricity. Ownership costs are flat too. Water and fertilizer are the easiest lines to wave off, yet in a run-to-waste setup part of every feed goes down the drain with its fertilizer, and the wiki shows how to count that honestly in its article on water and fertilizer in production costs. Whether to switch from bottled nutrients to single salts comes down to monthly solution volume: on a shelf of a few trays a salt kit takes almost two years to pay off, from 300 liters a month it pays back within a season.
So a tray that yields twice as much does carry a bigger cost, and the increase lands almost entirely in packaging and marketing. Double the yield on the pea tray and you add $4.80 in labels, $3.36 in packages and $4.80 in marketing, while media, labor and power stay put.
Where the yield numbers came from
Johnny’s Selected Seeds ran a microgreen yield trial at its research farm in 2017, seeding 29 varieties at least three times each and weighing what came off every 1020 tray. Line up that trial against the Missouri budget and the source becomes obvious.
| Crop | G693 yield, oz | Johnny’s trial, oz | G693 seed, g | Johnny’s seed, g |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mix | 11.5 | 11.5 (Mild Micro Mix) | 11.3 | 11 |
| Broccoli | 11.5 | 11.5 (Broccoli OG) | 11.3 | 13 |
| Cabbage | 15.0 | 15.0 (Tokyo Bekana) | 14.2 | 14 |
| Radish | 8.0 | 8.0 (Daikon OG) | 28.4 | 22.5 |
| Pea | 8.0 | not in the trial | 22 | not in the trial |
Four crops match to the tenth of an ounce. The fifth is the one crop Johnny’s never tested, because that trial covered small seeded varieties and peas are not one.
The pea column does not hold
Work backward from the seed line. The budget charges $0.38 per tray at $0.48 per ounce, which is 0.79 ounces, or 22 grams of pea seed on a 1020 tray.
Bootstrap Farmer’s growing chart calls for 200 to 275 grams of pea seed per 1020 tray, which is 7 to 9.7 ounces. Our own crop cards, which are built on a smaller Ukrainian tray, work out to 298 grams per 1020 at the same density. Two independent sources, both roughly ten times the budget figure.
Twenty two grams of pea seed is a few hundred seeds scattered across two hundred square inches. It would not produce a mat, let alone eight ounces of shoots.
Here is the trap for anyone reading that budget quickly. Fix the seed line alone, leaving yield at eight ounces, and the pea tray collapses from $6.58 to $2.98. That is the wrong conclusion. A tray sown with eight ounces of pea seed does not yield eight ounces of shoots. Both numbers move together.
Re-running the pea tray
Our reconstruction reproduces the published pea column to the cent: operating $23.93, total $25.41, net $6.59 against the printed 23.93, 25.42 and 6.58. Labels and packages are charged per ounce, marketing at 15% of sales, operating interest at 8.5% annual on half a year. With the arithmetic confirmed, the same machinery runs the corrected version.
For yield at a commercial seeding rate we use 20 ounces. That is what our crop cards give when scaled to a 1020, and it sits inside the one to two pounds that pea growers commonly report.
| Scenario | Sales | Seed | Operating | Total | Net |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| G693 as published | $32.00 | $0.38 | $23.93 | $25.41 | $6.59 |
| Seed line fixed alone, yield left at 8 oz | $32.00 | $3.84 | $27.54 | $29.02 | $2.98 |
| Both fixed: 8 oz seed, 20 oz yield | $80.00 | $3.84 | $47.81 | $49.29 | $30.71 |
| Same, organic seed at $0.88/oz | $80.00 | $7.04 | $51.15 | $52.63 | $27.37 |
| Cautious 16 oz yield, organic seed | $64.00 | $7.04 | $44.39 | $45.87 | $18.13 |
Corrected, the pea tray stops being the weakest column and becomes the strongest one in the table. It needs more seed than anything else on the rack, and it pays for it.
One caveat that belongs with those numbers. The corrected rows assume the same $4.00 per ounce the budget uses for every crop. Pea shoots sell for less per ounce than delicate micro mixes in a lot of markets, and a wholesale account will push that number down further. Run your own price through the column before you believe the bottom line.
What seed actually costs
Seed pricing works like a ladder, and which rung you stand on changes the tray by several dollars. These are True Leaf Market list prices for organic Yellow Sugar pea, taken September 20, 2026.
| Pack | Price | Per pound | Per ounce | 8 oz on a tray |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 lb | $21.37 | $21.37 | $1.34 | $10.69 |
| 5 lb | $70.40 | $14.08 | $0.88 | $7.04 |
| 25 lb | $256.24 | $10.25 | $0.64 | $5.12 |
| G693 assumption | $7.68 | $0.48 | $3.84 |
The budget’s $0.48 per ounce sits below the 25 pound organic price, so it is priced on conventional seed bought in bulk. Nothing wrong with that, as long as you notice it before planning an organic operation around the number.
The same ladder runs through the rest of the seed list. Black oil sunflower goes $16.31 for a pound, $48.38 for five, $180.68 for twenty five, which is $1.02, $0.60 and $0.45 an ounce. Buying in pounds instead of twenty five pound bags more than doubles the seed line on every tray you sow.
Electricity: one number, three rates
The budget charges $1.20 of power per pea tray at $0.12 per kilowatt hour. That works out to 10 kWh per tray per cycle, which covers lights, fans and the walk in cooler that sits in the capital list. Once there are several racks, the lights, pumps, and fans also have to be split across circuits, and the wiki on calculating electrical load shows how to size each line before the wiring starts running hot.
Current rates are higher. EIA’s Electric Power Monthly for June 2026 puts the U.S. average at 14.19 cents commercial and 18.34 cents residential, released August 26, 2026.
| Rate | Cents per kWh | Per tray at 10 kWh |
|---|---|---|
| G693 assumption | 12.00 | $1.20 |
| U.S. average commercial, June 2026 | 14.19 | $1.42 |
| U.S. average residential, June 2026 | 18.34 | $1.83 |
Sixty three cents a tray is not what sinks a farm. It is worth updating anyway, because the same two year old assumption tends to sit in every other line of a borrowed spreadsheet.
The $4,384 behind the tray
Ownership costs on the pea tray come to $1.48: depreciation $0.72, interest on capital $0.37, overhead and insurance $0.39. Behind that dollar and change sits the capital table.
| Item | Qty | Each | Total | Life |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Heavy duty 10×20 trays | 20 | $10 | $200 | 3 years |
| Stainless steel shelf unit, 4 levels | 1 | $150 | $150 | 10 years |
| LED lights | 4 | $225 | $900 | 10 years |
| Fans | 4 | $55 | $220 | 10 years |
| Cutter | 1 | $30 | $30 | 10 years |
| Cold storage | 1 | $2,500 | $2,500 | 10 years |
| Growing infrastructure, 8 sq ft | 8 | $48 | $384 | 10 years |
| Total | $4,384 |
The cold room is 57% of it. Everything that actually grows the plants, shelf plus lights plus fans plus trays, comes to $1,470. We walked through what that means for a first build in the breakdown of startup costs, where this same rack shows up as the middle tier.
One price to update: the budget carries trays at $10 each with a three year life. Bootstrap Farmer lists a shallow extra strength 1020 at $6.29 for one and $146.99 for thirty, which is $4.90 apiece. That halves the biggest depreciation item on the list.
Per tray is the wrong unit
A tray is a place on a shelf for a number of days, and crops hold that place for very different stretches. The budget’s own crop table gives the cycles: cabbage turns 37 times a year, radish 46, peas 32, broccoli 29, mix 27. Multiply the net by the cycles and the ranking rearranges itself.
| Crop | Net per tray | Cycles per year | Net per slot per year | Rack of 16 slots |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cabbage | $19.45 | 37 | $719.65 | $11,514 |
| Broccoli | $14.36 | 29 | $416.44 | $6,663 |
| Mix | $14.20 | 27 | $383.40 | $6,134 |
| Radish | $5.84 | 46 | $268.64 | $4,298 |
| Pea, as published | $6.58 | 32 | $210.56 | $3,369 |
| Pea, corrected | $27.37 | 32 | $875.84 | $14,013 |
Radish nets the least of any crop per tray and still beats the published pea column over a year, because it clears the shelf in eight days. Cabbage wins on both counts in the original table.
The right hand column is the one to sit with. A four level rack holding sixteen trays of cabbage returns $11,514 a year over all costs, on $4,384 of equipment. That is the honest promise of a single rack in a greenhouse, running every slot, every cycle, with everything sold. For what happens when a plan like that gets built on borrowed money and a growth promise, see the post-mortems on farms that raised hundreds of millions.
Each of those conditions is doing real work. Selling every ounce of 37 cycles means 592 trays of one crop leaving the building in a year. The arithmetic behind the income claims you see advertised starts breaking exactly there, on the sales side rather than the growing side. On the capital side the public numbers break too: the ministry promises 70 percent of a greenhouse project, the resolution allows 50.
Five lines to check in your own numbers
- Seed, in ounces per tray. Take the dollar figure, divide by your price per ounce, and see whether the answer is a plausible amount of seed. This is the check that caught the pea column.
- Yield, weighed on your own scale. Three trays of the same crop, same seeding rate, weighed after the cut. Borrowed yields carry someone else’s light, water and harvest stage.
- Labels and packaging, per unit sold. At $1.02 per clamshell, a tray split into twenty retail packs carries $20.40 before anything else. Selling the same tray in bulk to one chef carries almost none of it.
- Labor at your real rate. Fifteen minutes a tray at $20 an hour is $5.00. At $17 it is $4.25, and if you are the only employee it still belongs in the column.
- Your actual price per ounce. Every corrected row above rides on $4.00. Swap in what your accounts pay and the ranking of crops can change completely.
What chefs pay, and how to get in front of them, is covered in our guide to selling microgreens to restaurants. If the growing media line is the one you want to squeeze, the substrate comparison puts coco, jute, linen and peat side by side with what each one costs per tray. For what happens when these numbers do not hold, see nine reasons microgreens businesses fail. The USDA census works out to $1.70 a pound nationally, and the same piece shows why that figure fails a price check and cannot serve as a benchmark.
