The crop is mostly out. The invoices are still showing up, the last propane ticket is on the counter, and the repair shop finally sent the bill you’ve been expecting since the combine went down in October. Some lines in the 2026 budget landed right where you planned them. Others clearly didn’t.
You probably already know which bills hurt. A big repair or a heavy drying month tends to stick in your memory. But the bill that stung the most isn’t always the cost that changed your budget the most once it’s spread across your acres, and it isn’t always the one that should change next year’s plan.
If you’ve already started the 2027 farm budget, this is the next step. A good budget-to-actual review shows you where 2026 moved away from the plan, why it happened, and which of those differences deserve a place in 2027.
How Do You Compare a Farm Budget With Actual Costs?
Put each budgeted cost next to what you actually spent for the same crop, acres, and period. Then calculate the difference:
Dollar variance = actual cost − budgeted cost
Percentage variance = (actual cost − budgeted cost) ÷ budgeted cost × 100
Using these formulas, a positive number means the cost came in over budget and a negative number means it came in under.
Then find out what caused the difference. Price, quantity, acreage, timing, weather, and one-time expenses can all move a line for very different reasons. That cause is what tells you whether the variance should change your 2027 assumptions.
Start With the Same Units and Scope
A budget-to-actual comparison only works when you're comparing like with like. Before you calculate anything, make sure each line matches on:
The same crop and the same acres
The same field or enterprise, when your records allow it
Cost per acre against cost per acre, and cost per bushel against cost per bushel
Cash expenses against cash expenses, or full economic costs against full economic costs
If acreage changed, look at both the total variance and the per-acre variance. Say you budgeted $85,000 of fertilizer for 500 corn acres, or $170 per acre. You then spent $91,500 after adding a 40-acre rented field. Across 540 acres, that’s about $169.44 per acre. The total increased because the acres changed, while the per-acre cost remained close to plan. The cost didn't miss — the acres changed.
Yield can change the picture too. If your cost per acre came in close to plan at $950 but corn yielded 185 bushels instead of the 200 you budgeted, your cost per bushel moved from $4.75 to about $5.14 without a single expense line going over. (Hypothetical figures.)
Gather Your 2026 Budget and Actual Records
Most operations have the numbers somewhere. They're just spread across invoices, fuel tickets, repair bills, dryer logs, loan statements, a spreadsheet or two, accounting software, and memory. Pull together what you can:
Your original 2026 budget, plus any revised version you made during the year
Actual invoices and expenses, along with input quantities and prices
Acres by crop and field, and actual yields
Fuel, labor, repair, and equipment records
Drying and storage records
Interest, financing, and operating-note statements
Custom work, crop-insurance expense, and land costs
How you allocated shared or overhead costs between crops
With harvest wrapping up, some 2026 numbers will still be coming in. If you’re waiting on a final repair bill, loan statement, drying charge, or other year-end expense, enter your best figure and mark it as estimated.
Give each number a status: final, estimated, or still coming. That way you won't make a permanent 2027 decision based on a number that's still moving.
Calculate the Farm Budget Variance
Three formulas cover most of what you need:
Dollar variance = actual cost − budgeted cost
Percentage variance = dollar variance ÷ budgeted cost × 100
Per-acre variance = total dollar variance ÷ applicable acres
Hypothetical example, not a 2026 average: You budgeted fertilizer at $170 per corn acre and actually spent $183 per acre.
Dollar variance: $183 − $170 = $13 per acre over budget
Percentage variance: $13 ÷ $170 × 100 = about 7.6%
Across 500 corn acres: $13 × 500 = $6,500
Percentages help you compare lines of different sizes, but don't let them steer the whole review. A 40% miss on a small line may matter less than a 7% miss on your biggest input. Look at the dollars, the percentage, and the per-acre effect together.
Find Out Why the Number Moved
Most meaningful variances trace back to one or more of these causes:
Price: The same quantity cost more or less than planned.
Quantity or use: You used more or less product, fuel, labor, or fieldwork.
Acreage or crop mix: The budget covered different acres than the actual.
Timing: A cost moved into or out of the year.
Weather or field conditions: Replanting, extra passes, drying, or a longer harvest changed costs.
Equipment: A breakdown or major repair moved machinery expense.
Financing: The rate, amount borrowed, or timing changed.
Planning or allocation: The original assumption was incomplete, or a cost landed on a different crop, field, or period.
Plenty of these aren’t within your control, and that’s fine. The goal is to know which kind of miss you’re looking at, because a price change, a wet fall, and a planning gap each call for a different 2027 response.
When you have quantity and price records for an input, you can split the variance into its two parts. A common approach is:
Price effect = (actual price − budgeted price) × actual quantity
Quantity effect = (actual quantity − budgeted quantity) × budgeted price
Hypothetical: You budgeted 180 pounds of nitrogen at $0.60 per pound ($108 per acre) and applied 190 pounds at $0.65 per pound ($123.50 per acre). That’s $15.50 over.
The price effect is $0.05 × 190 = $9.50, and the quantity effect is 10 × $0.60 = $6.00. Together they add back to $15.50, and now you know most of the miss came from price, not rate.
Review the Cost Categories That Usually Matter Most
Start with the categories big enough or variable enough to change your 2027 plan — no need to dissect every line.
Seed, Fertilizer, and Crop Protection
Separate price from quantity first. A higher input bill isn’t automatically wasteful. It may reflect added acres, a rate change your agronomist recommended, or a rescue treatment the field needed. The question for 2027 is whether the price, the rate, or the acres will look the same next year.
Fuel and Field Operations
Compare gallons, price per gallon, passes, and acres covered where your records allow. If gallons were up but price held steady, look at what changed in the field: an extra tillage trip, a replant, or a slow, wet harvest. Knowing your cost per pass makes it easier to see which operation drove the difference.
Related: Cost Per Pass Farming Explained: What Each Field Operation Really Costs Per Acre
Drying and Storage
Drying variances usually come from harvest moisture, bushels handled, energy prices, or how long grain stayed in storage. Compare each against your budget assumption before deciding what changed. If moisture was the driver, check it against prior years before raising your 2027 drying line.
Related: What Grain Drying Really Adds to Your Cost Per Bushel
Repairs and Machinery
The repair line often mixes very different costs. Split routine repairs and maintenance from major breakdowns or overhauls, equipment purchases, and changes in custom hire.
An equipment purchase isn’t an operating repair, and putting it in the same bucket will distort both lines. Iowa State’s guidance on estimating farm machinery costs is a useful reference for separating ownership costs from operating costs like repairs.
Interest and Financing
Check the amount borrowed, the interest rate, when you drew funds, how long the balance stayed out, and the operating-note balance through the year. An interest variance can come from the cost of money, the amount financed, or both.
If you borrowed more because inputs cost more, the real story may be in the input line, not the interest line.
Labor, Custom Work, and Transportation
Include these if they’re part of your operation. If you’re reviewing a cash budget, stay consistent with how owner labor was treated in the original plan.
Separate One-Time Surprises From Costs That May Repeat
Before a meaningful variance changes the 2027 budget, give it a label.
More Likely to Affect 2027
Input assumptions that keep landing below actual quotes
Routine repairs rising over several years
Extra field passes that happen most seasons
Rent, insurance, financing, subscription, or service costs expected to continue
A breakdown that happens every other year isn’t really one-time, and a price jump that reverses by spring isn’t really recurring. If you have records from 2024 and 2025, put them next to 2026. A pattern across three years is much stronger evidence than one bad season.
A Hypothetical Corn-and-Soybean Budget-to-Actual Example
Illustration only. These are invented figures for a fictional 1,000-acre operation with 500 acres of corn and 500 acres of soybeans. They are not 2026 Midwest averages or typical cost increases.
| Cost category | 2026 budget | 2026 actual | Dollar variance | Per-acre variance | Reason | 2027 action |
| Fertilizer (corn) | $85,000 | $91,500 | +$6,500 (7.6%) | +$13.00 per corn acre | Spring nitrogen priced above the fall assumption; rates on plan | Use current quotes; keep a range until product is booked |
| Fuel | $22,000 | $24,000 | +$2,000 (9.1%) | +$2.00 per acre | More gallons during a slow, wet harvest; price near plan | Hold baseline; note weather; recheck next fall |
| Routine repairs | $30,000 | $34,500 | +$4,500 (15.0%) | +$4.50 per acre | Third straight year over budget on an aging planter and combine | Raise the baseline; review the equipment plan |
| Major combine repair | $0 | $18,000 | +$18,000 (not budgeted) | +$18.00 per acre | Unexpected transmission failure at harvest | Keep separate; don't add to the routine repair baseline |
| Drying (corn) | $30,000 | $41,000 | +$11,000 (36.7%) | +$22.00 per corn acre | Harvest moisture well above plan; propane price close to budget | Compare moisture with prior years; budget a low, expected, and high range |
| Custom work (fall strip-till) | $12,000 | $6,000 | −$6,000 (−50.0%) | −$12.00 per acre (500 acres planned) | Wet fall; half the planned acres pushed to spring | Move $6,000 into 2027; not a savings |
| Total | $179,000 | $215,000 | +$36,000 (20.1%) | +$36.00 per farm acre | | |
Per-acre variance uses the acres each cost applies to: 500 corn acres for fertilizer, drying, and the planned strip-till; 1,000 farm acres for fuel and repairs. If the budgeted amount is zero, report the dollar variance as an unbudgeted cost rather than calculating a percentage.
The combine repair is the biggest dollar miss on the sheet, and it’s the one most likely to stay in your memory. But if it really was a one-time failure, adding $18,000 to next year's routine repair line would overstate 2027 costs.
The routine repair line is smaller at $4,500, yet it probably deserves more attention. It's been over budget three years running, which suggests the original assumption is too low for the equipment you're running.
Drying had the largest per-acre hit on corn. Whether it belongs in the 2027 baseline depends on whether 2026 moisture was unusual for your ground or part of a pattern. And the custom work line came in $6,000 under budget because half the job slid into spring.
See Which Farm Costs Moved the Most
Keep your 2026 budget, actual costs, and 2027 assumptions side by side so the differences are easier to spot and explain.
Compare Farm Budgets in roots
Don’t Automatically Copy the 2026 Actuals Into 2027
It’s tempting to take this year’s actual spending and drop it straight into next year’s budget. It feels more grounded than the old estimate. But 2026 actuals include weather, timing, and one-off events that may not repeat, and copying them wholesale builds those surprises into your plan.
Before you change a 2027 line, ask:
Is this cost expected to repeat?
Did acreage, quantity, or timing cause the difference?
Was the original assumption wrong or incomplete?
Was the expense tied to unusual weather or a one-time event?
Would a range make more sense than one number?
The 2026 actual is evidence, not a forecast. Use it to correct the assumptions it disproves and leave the rest alone.
Outside numbers can help you pressure-test an assumption. Iowa State's estimated costs of crop production and FINBIN's crop and whole-farm benchmark reports provide outside context, and our guide to farm financial benchmarks covers how to use them.
They’re context, though, not a replacement for your own acres, yields, equipment, financing, and practices.
Turn the Review Into a Better 2027 Budget
Once each major variance has a reason and a label, updating the plan gets much simpler:
Carry forward costs you have evidence will recur.
Replace weak assumptions with current quotes, contracts, or several years of records.
Keep unusual expenses separate from the normal baseline.
Use ranges for unsettled costs such as drying or fertilizer.
Write down why you changed each major assumption and when you’ll review it again.
That note explaining the change is easy to skip and hard to replace. Next year, when the drying line looks high, you’ll want to know whether you raised it because of one wet fall or because three years of records pointed the same way.
Build Your 2027 Budget With Better Numbers
Once you’ve figured out which 2026 assumptions held up and which ones didn’t, the next job is carrying those lessons into the 2027 plan.
CropOps in roots supports multi-year budgeting, cost-of-production analysis, cost-per-acre breakdowns, university benchmarking, and lender-ready reports.
Cost Per Pass adds detail on fuel, labor, and equipment costs by field operation, which helps when you're trying to see why field costs moved.
roots won’t tell you why a variance happened or decide which 2026 costs belong in next year’s budget. Your records and judgment still do that work. roots gives those updated assumptions somewhere to live alongside the rest of the farm plan.
Don’t Let One Weird Year Write the Next Budget
The biggest dollar overrun may turn out to be a one-time event. A smaller difference that keeps showing up year after year may deserve the bigger adjustment.
Compare the numbers on the same basis, figure out what moved them, and carry forward only what the evidence supports.
That way, 2026’s surprises make the 2027 budget more accurate instead of simply making it bigger.
This article is educational and general in nature. It isn’t individualized accounting, tax, legal, agronomic, lending, or financial advice. All example figures are hypothetical. Costs, prices, and terms vary by farm and change over time. Review major decisions with qualified professionals, including your lender, agronomist, and tax adviser.
Farm Budget vs. Actual FAQs
What is a farm budget variance?
A farm budget variance is the difference between what you planned to spend on a cost and what you actually spent. It’s usually shown in dollars, as a percentage of the budgeted amount, and per acre. A variance tells you where the plan and reality split, but you still need to find the reason behind it.
How do I compare budgeted and actual farm costs?
Put each budgeted cost next to the actual cost for the same crop, acres, and period. Subtract the budget from the actual to get the dollar variance, divide that by the budget and multiply by 100 for the percentage, and divide by the applicable acres for the per-acre variance.
Then identify whether price, quantity, acreage, timing, weather, or a one-time event caused the difference.
What does a positive cost variance mean?
When you calculate variance as actual cost minus budgeted cost, a positive number means you spent more than planned and a negative number means you spent less.
Neither is automatically good or bad. An overrun may reflect added acres, and an underrun may mean a job was delayed into the next year.
Should I use total cost or cost per acre?
Use both. Total cost shows the full dollar effect on the operation, while cost per acre helps show whether the cost itself changed or the acres did.
If acreage changed during the year, per-acre figures keep the comparison fair. For yield-related questions, cost per bushel adds another useful view.
Should every 2026 cost become the 2027 budget?
No. Actual 2026 costs include weather, timing shifts, and one-time events that may not repeat. Update a 2027 assumption when the evidence shows a lasting change, such as a confirmed price, a recurring pattern across several years, or an assumption the original budget missed.
Can roots compare farm budgets across years?
Yes. CropOps in roots supports multi-year budgets, cost-of-production and cost-per-acre analysis, and scenario comparisons, so you can keep 2026 and 2027 plans side by side. roots doesn't determine why a cost changed or whether it was justified. The comparison depends on the accuracy of the costs, acres, and assumptions you enter.