Cross-posted from beginningfarmers.org, an excellent resource for beginning (and existing) farmers.
The following is a fantastic guest article that really gives a comprehensive look at what to charge for your farm products. It provides useful information and great insights about marketing, price, calculating production and labor costs, and much more. For even more on this topic, it’s really worth checking out the excellent Farm Flows posts at www.littleseedfarm.com. Also, be sure to take a look at the links at the end of the article on marketing and price, as well as our Business Planning Page. Thanks to Scrapple for sharing his extensive knowledge on this topic!
As beginning farmers we’ve found it very helpful to interact with other beginners and share our cumulative knowledge as we all learn together. Starting a farming business is a daunting task and it helps to learn from others as we proceed down this path. One of the questions that comes up most frequently when chatting with other beginning farmers is how to price your farm products. This can be a very confusing proposition for someone with limited business experience and little financial background. Even for those with experience it can be a confounding problem. Having a background in business and economics and the experience of operating two profitable (although very small) businesses in the past, I thought it would be helpful to share an overview of some of our thoughts about pricing strategy.