Microgreen Yield and Profit Planner

Plan a microgreen crop cycle before you sow

Microgreens look simple from a distance: sow a tray, turn on the lights, harvest a week or two later, and sell a vivid, high-value crop. The business reality is more precise. A tray can be full and beautiful yet still underperform financially if the seeding rate was too heavy, if yield was weaker than expected, or if electricity cost quietly ate into the margin. That is why a planner like this one is useful. It turns a production idea into a cycle-by-cycle estimate so you can ask a very practical question before you spend money: if I run this batch the way I am planning to run it, what will it likely yield, what will it bring in, and what will it cost in seed and light power?

This calculator focuses on one harvest cycle. It estimates five outputs from the values you enter: total seed cost, total electricity cost, total harvested weight, total revenue, and profit per cycle. That makes it helpful for small urban farms, market gardeners, restaurant suppliers, classroom grow racks, and home growers who are deciding whether a crop plan is worth repeating. The goal is not to replace a full farm budget. The goal is to give you a fast, transparent margin estimate that you can compare across tray counts, varieties, and lighting schedules.

In plain terms, the form asks you for the variables you control or can estimate ahead of time. You tell the planner how many trays you want to run, how much seed each tray needs, how much that seed costs, how much finished product you expect to harvest, what price you expect to receive, and how much lighting energy you will use during the crop cycle. The planner then combines those inputs in a consistent way. If you change only one assumption at a time, the result becomes a useful scenario tool rather than just a one-off number.

What each input means in day-to-day growing

Number of Trays is your batch size. If you are planning one shelf of product, enter only the trays for that shelf. If you are budgeting an entire rack or weekly sowing schedule, enter the tray count for that run. This number scales nearly everything else in the model because each tray needs seed, receives light, and contributes to harvest weight.

Seed Cost per Gram is the cost of seed divided down to a per-gram basis. Many growers buy seed by the pound or kilogram, so this is one of the most common conversion mistakes. If you pay by the ounce, pound, or kilogram, convert that cost to dollars per gram first. Using a per-gram figure keeps the math aligned with the next input, which is how many grams of seed you sow into each tray.

Seeds per Tray is your seeding rate in grams for one tray. This variable matters because oversowing can increase the seed bill quickly, and the yield gain from heavier seeding is not always proportional. In some crops, a dense sow can improve visual fullness up to a point; beyond that point, extra seed mostly increases cost, raises disease risk, and crowds the canopy. A planner cannot know your exact cultivar behavior, but it can show you how expensive each extra gram of seed becomes across a full batch.

Yield per Tray is the finished harvested weight in grams from one tray. This is the most important reality-check input in the whole form. If your expected yield is too optimistic, revenue and profit will be overstated. If you have past harvest notes, use your own average rather than a catalog number or social media example. Yield per tray should reflect your actual system, your cultivar, your harvest stage, and your market standard for what counts as saleable product.

Sale Price per Gram converts harvested weight into revenue. Some growers sell by clamshell, by ounce, or by bulk bag. However you price the product, convert it to dollars per gram before entering it here. This makes apples-to-apples comparison easier. A tray may look profitable at a premium restaurant rate and unprofitable at a wholesale account rate, even when the crop itself is identical.

Lighting Power per Tray, Light Hours per Day, Electricity Cost per kWh, and Days to Harvest work together as the energy side of the model. The planner assumes each tray uses the listed wattage for the listed number of hours every day until harvest. That is a simplified but useful estimate for indoor production. If your setup uses a whole fixture over several trays, divide the fixture wattage by the number of trays it serves so that the per-tray power figure stays consistent with the rest of the form.

The most reliable way to use the form is to keep every entry tied to one tray and one crop cycle. If you mix units, the result can look precise while being wrong. For example, entering a sale price per ounce while the form expects price per gram will distort revenue immediately. The same is true if you enter total rack wattage as if it were per-tray wattage. Small unit mistakes become large profit mistakes when multiplied by many trays.

How the planner converts your inputs into costs, yield, and margin

The calculator uses straightforward production math. First, it computes how much seed the batch consumes. Next, it estimates how many kilowatt-hours of lighting the batch uses over the full crop cycle. Then it calculates finished yield, gross revenue, and the remaining profit after subtracting seed and electricity cost. This is why the tool is good for quick planning: each result is traceable to a specific physical part of the grow.

The page keeps the general MathML expressions below, which describe the idea that a result can be treated as a function of several inputs and that a total can be built from the weighted contributions of many parts. That is exactly what happens here, only with tray count, seed rate, yield, price, power, time, and electricity rate taking the role of those inputs.

For this specific planner, the cycle-profit formula can be written more concretely as follows. Here, T is tray count, Y is yield per tray in grams, P is sale price per gram, G is seed grams per tray, C_s is seed cost per gram, W is lighting power per tray in watts, H is light hours per day, D is days to harvest, and C_e is electricity cost per kilowatt-hour.

Reading that formula from left to right tells the story of the crop. Revenue comes from trays times yield times selling price. Seed cost comes from trays times seeding rate times cost per gram. Electricity cost comes from watts converted into kilowatt-hours across the full lighting schedule. Profit is whatever remains after those two modeled costs are removed from revenue. The planner intentionally keeps the math direct so that you can test assumptions without wondering where a hidden factor came from.

Worked example with realistic indoor tray values

Suppose you want to plan a batch of 20 trays. You estimate that each tray needs 28 grams of seed at $0.03 per gram, yields 220 grams of saleable microgreens, and sells for $0.06 per gram. Your lighting setup uses 20 watts per tray, runs for 14 hours per day, your electricity costs $0.15 per kWh, and the crop is harvested after 10 days.

Now walk through the same steps the calculator uses:

Seed cost = 20 trays × 28 g per tray × $0.03 per g = $16.80.

Electricity use = 20 W × 14 h × 20 trays × 10 days = 56,000 Wh = 56 kWh.

Electricity cost = 56 kWh × $0.15 = $8.40.

Total yield = 20 trays × 220 g per tray = 4,400 g.

Revenue = 4,400 g × $0.06 per g = $264.00.

Profit per cycle = $264.00 − $16.80 − $8.40 = $238.80.

This example is helpful because each result has an operational meaning. The seed bill tells you the cash tied up before the crop is even visible. The energy cost shows how much the lighting schedule contributes to expenses. The yield and revenue reveal whether your harvest assumption supports your selling price. The final profit number is a useful margin estimate for one run, but it is not the same thing as full business profit unless you also account for labor, substrate, packaging, crop loss, sanitation supplies, and overhead.

How to interpret the result panel without over-trusting it

When you press Plan, the result panel shows a compact summary of the batch. Start by checking the sign and size of the final profit. A positive number means the modeled revenue is greater than the modeled seed and electricity cost. A negative number means those two modeled costs already exceed revenue, which is a strong warning sign because a real business would still have more costs to cover beyond those. If the estimate is barely positive, the actual batch may still be weak once labor and packing materials are included.

Next, look at the components rather than just the final line. If seed cost looks unexpectedly high, revisit the seeding rate and seed price conversion. If electricity cost looks tiny or huge, confirm that the wattage is really per tray and that light hours are daily hours, not total hours for the whole crop. If revenue looks unrealistic, check whether your sale price reflects your actual market channel. In practice, most confusing outcomes come from one mistaken unit or one overly hopeful yield estimate.

The planner is especially valuable for scenario testing. Try one conservative case, one baseline case, and one optimistic case. For a conservative run, lower the expected yield slightly or raise the electricity rate if local utility prices fluctuate. For an optimistic run, increase price only if you truly have a market that consistently pays it. Comparing those scenarios tells you whether the batch is robust or fragile. A plan that only works under perfect assumptions deserves caution.

The table below reuses the worked-example assumptions and changes only tray count. Because the formula is linear for the variables shown here, total profit rises roughly in proportion to trays as long as yield, sale price, and per-tray energy use remain steady.

That linear pattern is useful, but it also reveals one of the model's boundaries. Real production does not always scale perfectly. Expansion can reduce some costs through efficiency, but it can also create bottlenecks in labor, airflow, washing, packaging, cooling, and delivery. So use the tray comparison as a planning baseline, not as a guarantee that every larger run will behave exactly the same.

Assumptions, limitations, and smart next steps

This planner intentionally models a narrow and understandable slice of the business. It includes seed and lighting electricity because those are measurable, direct, and easy to compare across scenarios. It does not automatically include labor, growing media, trays, nutrient solution, water, packaging, labels, transport, spoilage, or the percentage of product that fails to reach saleable quality. If you use the result for business planning, treat the displayed profit as a partial operating margin, then subtract your remaining costs separately.

It also assumes your crop quality is good enough to sell at the price you entered. If heavy seeding, weak airflow, or inconsistent lighting lowers quality, the planner cannot detect that. Likewise, if longer growth time increases height and harvest weight but reduces shelf life or market acceptance, the planner will not know unless you reflect that reality in the yield and price figures you enter. A calculator is only as honest as the assumptions behind it.

A sensible workflow is to harvest a few real trays, weigh them, record the seed used, and track actual utility consumption for one cycle or one rack. Those notes will make your future entries much stronger than generic averages. Once you trust your own per-tray numbers, this page becomes a fast margin dashboard. You can compare crop types, test whether premium pricing justifies extra production time, or see how a change in electricity rates alters the economics of indoor production.

If you want a quick interpretation rule, use this one: raising seed rate or light input only helps if the added saleable yield is worth more than the added cost. That simple idea sits underneath the whole page. The calculator shows it in dollars. The optional mini-game below turns the same tradeoff into a fast visual challenge.