CommunicationPublished on 7 July 2026

Full Costs Now Available Online

Full-cost calculation depicts the profitability of individual farm activities. Practitioners and extension services can use it as a basis for decision-making, e.g. in the case of investments. The data have recently been published online.

Full-cost calculation is an important agribusiness management tool that enables all costs – including imputed costs for equity capital and deployed labour – to be allocated to a farm activity, thereby depicting its actual profitability in a transparent manner. With this knowledge, farm managers can assess whether a farm activity is financially worthwhile.

Decision-making basis for practitioners and extension services

In the future, Agroscope will be making these analyses available online annually to offer sound bases for decision-making to farmers, extension workers and researchers. The first online version of the full costs is based on data from 2024 and provides detailed information on revenues, direct costs and labour costs as well as additional overheads.

The Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) information is updated annually every November.

Determining lower limits for prices

But how exactly can farmers benefit from this? For Petyo Bonev, Head of Agroscope’s ‘Managerial Economics’ Research Group, it is clear that full-cost accounting can be used e.g. to calculate lower price limits: “Farmers can determine what minimum price they must achieve in order to cover all their costs. Full-cost accounting supports investment decisions, i.e. whether new machines, buildings or production approaches are profitable. Lastly, full- cost accounting also helps with the assigning of value to own services: own labour, the equity capital invested and the soil are recognised as costs. This makes it transparent whether the farm also remunerates these factors appropriately.”

Anonymised data for research

Petyo Bonev is grateful that farmers voluntarily make their accountancy data available to his research team. The data are anonymised to protect data privacy. “The full-cost figures are calculated on the basis of the agricultural accountancy data collected by Agroscope within the framework of the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN). Full costs are determined according to a scientifically recognised method” Bonev explains. The description of the methodology, like the full-cost data, is published on the Agroscope website.