Farm Economics Calculator

Find out whether your seaweed farm covers its costs, what price it needs, and which cost matters most.

Start with your harvest and your price. Add the costs you know. Leave a box empty if you do not know it, or enter 0 if you have none; the result names anything left out. Amounts are Canadian dollars.

See an example

20 lines of 100 m (2 km of line), part-time labour, selling wet kelp. An example of a first farm, not a measured one. Its figures are made up to show how the calculator works; they are not yours and not measured.

At these numbers the farm loses $15,145 a year.

Each saleable wet kg costs $7.77 to produce and sells for $1.83. To cover your costs you need a price of about $7.77, 4.2 times what you charge now, or lower costs.
Your biggest cost is labour at $8,000 a year, 40% of all costs.
85% of your costs stay about the same each year: they do not change whether you grow more or less. Each extra kg adds $0.64 toward them, so at today's yearly costs you would need to sell about 26,294 kg a year, 10.3 times what you sell now. Those costs do rise as a farm grows, but more slowly than the harvest, which is why scale matters so much in seaweed farming.

A: Your harvest

Number of lines

Length of each line (m)

Wet kg harvested from each metre of line

I don't know

No yield for BC farms has been published. In Maine, a sugar kelp farm needed about 4 kg per metre (2.69 lb per foot) to cover its costs. GreenWave found that the profitable kelp farms it surveyed averaged about 5.2 kg per metre (3.5 lb per foot).

Share of the crop lost before harvest (%)

B: What you sell

You sell it

Price you are paid ($ per kg wet)Your selling price is the processor’s raw material cost. Work it out in the Processor Economics Calculator and it will be offered here.Published: farmers in Alaska and Maine were paid US$0.50 to US$1.00 per lb wet. That is about $1.52 to $3.04 per kg at 1.38 Canadian dollars to the US dollar, an example rate. No price paid to BC farmers has been published. Sources

C: Your costs

Seed or seeded line ($ per metre)This is the hatchery’s selling price. Work it out in the Hatchery Economics Calculator and it will be offered here.No price for seed or seeded line has been published. Sources

Hours of work a year

Pay per hour ($)

Fuel and boat a year ($)

Gear and maintenance a year ($)

Lease and tenure fees a year ($)

Processing and packaging ($ per kg sold)

Insurance and admin a year ($)

Equipment and set up ($)

Years the equipment lasts

Enter your lines, their length and what each metre yields to see what the farm produces. Then add your price and the costs you know.

This tool helps you think through your numbers; it does not promise a profit.