Costs

Every cost and subsidy figure this site holds, by country, with year and source. Most are British, because British bodies publish. The gaps are listed too, and we would like your help closing them.

Four of the technique pages on this site were written with thin cost sections, because no verified European figure could be found. Mediterranean and Eastern European costs, the regions where drought bites hardest, are almost entirely absent from anything published openly. This page does two things: it puts every figure we do hold in one place, and it asks you for the ones we do not.

Three rules apply to every row. A figure is published only with its country and year. A figure from a vendor or an industry body is flagged as such. Nothing is converted between currencies, because a UK contractor rate converted into euros is not a Spanish contractor rate.

What we know

United Kingdom

British figures dominate this page because the AHDB (Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board) and the NAAC (National Association of Agricultural Contractors) publish standardised costings openly every year. They are useful as an order of magnitude elsewhere, and no more than that.

Straw prices. Straw is the opportunity cost of keeping residue on the field.

Straw spikes in drought years: 2018 and late 2025 both followed dry summers. The years when retaining residue helps most are the years when selling it pays most. Baling traffic can also cost up to £55/ha in compaction remedy on medium and heavy soils in wet years (AHDB, UK, 2019), a cost usually left out of the farmer's own sum.

Contractor rates, NAAC 2025-26 season, assuming red diesel at 70p/litre (Farmers Weekly).

Baling per bale, same season: round 1.2 m £4.16, round 1.5 m £4.75, 120×90 cm £7.52, 120×130 cm £8.78. Rates rose 5.7% for 2025-26 and a further 4.84% into 2026-27.

Derived, not published: plough-based establishment (plough, shallow power harrow, conventional drill) comes to £215.82/ha against £77.63/ha for a direct-drill pass, a saving of about £138/ha (UK, 2025-26). It is our arithmetic from the table above, and an upper bound, because it leaves out the herbicide that replaces cultivation. Note that the direct-drill pass itself costs more than a conventional one; the saving is the passes you no longer make. See no-till.

Cover crops. The AHDB and ADAS "Maxi Cover Crop" project, 38 months from 2016, published May 2020 (AHDB).

No itemised seed, drilling and destruction breakdown was published, so the per-hectare seed cost is still missing for the UK. The project's own explanation was the absence of enough yield benefit in the cash crops to cover establishment.

Spain

Eco-scheme rates, 2025 campaign, definitive unit amounts published by FEGA on 21 May 2026 (Agronews). Rates fall above the hectare threshold; the second column includes the €25/ha bonus for a two-year commitment.

Cover-crop seed for olive groves, vendor price. A perennial grass mix sold for olive inter-rows costs about €55 per 10 kg including VAT at a recommended 30–50 kg/ha, so roughly €164–273/ha of seed in the first year (Agroleza, Spain, 2026, vendor page). It is sold as self-reseeding, so the cost is not annual. No Spanish mowing cost for spontaneous cover was found.

Diesel and passes. Spain's own evaluation of the direct-seeding eco-scheme quotes the national energy agency's rule of thumb: one tractor covers 160 ha under conventional tillage, 200 under reduced tillage and 250 under direct seeding (IDAE via MAPA, Spain, 2025). It gives no per-hectare cost.

Rainfed pulse yields, 2023: chickpea 835 kg/ha, dry pea 1,023, lentil 626; grain-legume area fell 11.6% in 2024 to 434,290 ha (MAPA statistics via Agronews).

Almond floor management, labour cost per hectare (Granada and Almería, farmer survey and trials 2015 to 2018, De Leijster et al. 2020):

The compost itself was sheep-manure bokashi applied by hand; no purchase price per m³ was found for that trial. Details on the case studies page.

Bought compost, bulk. A Spanish supplier listed quality compost at €50/t + 10% VAT, transport extra in 2025 (vendor listing). An older EU survey put agricultural compost at €0–2/t, up to €14/t with a spreading service (EU, ~2008). UK spreading runs £2.50–3.00/t and haulage is 25–70% of delivered cost (UK compost supplier quoting ADAS, undated, vendor). Europe's whole compost and digestate output, 15.8 Mt/yr across 18 countries, covers 0.7% of arable land at 30 t/ha (European Compost Network, industry body). On-farm composting of a farm's own residues: no European labour or machinery cost found. See the compost page.

Ireland and the United Kingdom: grazing infrastructure

See rotational grazing.

Poland

Eco-scheme rates, 2025 campaign. One point was worth 87.18 zł, about €20.40 at the official 2025 payment rate of 4.2698 zł/€ (Ministry rates via Tygodnik Rolniczy).

Winter cover crop establishment, from independent Polish farm press.

Against the 435.90 zł/ha payment, the subsidy covers the direct cost and little else. The funding page has the eligibility rules and the 30% penalty for a missed date.

France

Écorégime, 2025 campaign, whole-farm flat rates fixed by decree on 23 September 2025 (SOREC).

No French cost figures for any practice were found. Arvalis and the Chambres d'agriculture publish them, behind logins or in documents a web search does not surface.

Heritage and population wheat, farm gate. Sold to artisan bakers at up to €1,000/t organic, about double standard organic wheat, against roughly €200/t for conventional soft wheat in 2024 (La Toque, trade press; Réussir). See drought-tolerant varieties.

Germany: biochar

The credit is usually issued to the producer at pyrolysis, not to the farmer who spreads the char. See biochar.

Europe and vendor figures: mycorrhizal inoculants

Every row here comes from a seller or a retail listing; no independent European figure exists.

See mycorrhizal inoculation.

Spain: what irrigation water actually costs, and how it is billed

This is the expensive end, not the average. Campo de Cartagena depends on transferred and desalinated water, which is why its price is several times the typical European range. Use it as a dated example of what water can cost, not as a European figure.

How you are billed matters more than the price. European countries charge for irrigation water in structurally different ways. Spain and France charge by the cubic metre, so using less water costs less money. Italy and Greece have charged by the hectare, on evidence that is now decades old and that we have not been able to recheck. Where the charge is per hectare, saving water saves nothing on the bill, and the financial case for every water-saving technique on this site collapses even though the agronomic case survives. If you do not know which regime you are in, that is the first thing to find out. See precision irrigation.

Irrigation scheduling: mostly free, and uncosted where it is not

See precision irrigation.

Czechia

Direct payments, 2025, approved 9 October 2025 at 24.335 Kč/€ (Ministry via BusinessInfo).

Agroforestry figures from EURAF, at 100 trees per hectare. These are what the state pays, which is the only European establishment figure we have; the actual cost of planting is not published.

Slovakia

Water retention structures, programme-level cost on a 2019 basis, from the Landscape and Watershed Recovery Programme for the Košice region (EEA Climate-ADAPT).

So roughly €5,000 for 1,000 m³ of dispersed rural capacity. This is not a farm-pond quote, and it comes from a relatively low-construction-cost member state. See water retention landscapes.

Canada, labelled: grain separation for intercrops

No European figure exists, so these are shown with their origin and are not converted. Separating mixed grain by size with a rotary screen cleaner costs CAD 0.40–0.60 per bushel, roughly CAD 15–22 per tonne of wheat; colour sorting CAD 0.80–1.00 per bushel (Canada, undated, No-Till Farmer, practitioner press). A UK vendor's on-farm separator was reported with a payback of "three to five years" and no price (UK, 2024). England's Sustainable Farming Incentive paid £55/ha for companion cropping (2024). See intercropping.

Heritage grain break-even prices, Ontario, 2023. Spelt needed CAD 750/t against CAD 700 for organic wheat to match margin; einkorn about CAD 2,000/t because half its weight is hull and it yields about half a tonne an acre (Farmtario). EU grain sorghum averages 5.62 t/ha; France grew 103,000 ha in 2024 (Sorghum ID, industry body, 2024). See drought-tolerant varieties.

Not published: United States irrigation figures

We hold US market figures for subsurface drip installation and maintenance. Under this page's own rules they are not published as European costs. The engineering properties do transfer: buried drip lasts 12–15 years, 15–20 with good water quality, against 5–10 years for surface drip. See subsurface irrigation.

What we do not know, and would like to

Every row here is a real gap that has blocked at least one research run. The section after the table explains what a usable figure looks like, and why we cannot yet take one from you.

Send us a figure: not yet, and we would rather say so

There is no submission channel open. The owner of this site has not set one up, so there is currently nowhere to send a figure and nobody to read it. Every "help us" in the table above is a statement of what is missing, not a working invitation. We would rather admit that than publish an address nobody monitors.

The block below is worth keeping anyway, because it is the standard we hold our own figures to. Nothing on this site is published without a country, a year and a kind of source, and the reason the gap table above is so long is that we apply that rule to ourselves.

Country and region:
Year (or invoice date):
Item (what was bought, hired or paid for):
Figure and unit (e.g. €/ha, €/t, €/hour, zł/ha):
Kind of source (invoice / contractor quote / rate card / published table / from memory):
Link or reference, if published:
Do you sell this item or service? (yes / no):
Contact, optional:

The rules we would apply, and already apply to ourselves. A figure is published only with its country, year and kind of source attached. A figure from someone who sells the item is marked as a vendor figure. We do not convert currencies. A figure from memory is published as farmer-reported and replaced as soon as a documented one arrives. Contact details would never be published.

If you are reading this and you run the site, that is the one thing standing between the gap table above and the people who could close it.

Subsidy rows on this page are 2025 values and are set after the season by dividing a fixed budget among applicants, so they are ceilings, not promises. The funding page explains how each scheme works. The stress test uses the UK figures above as its defaults.