What an Avocado Farm Actually Pays Its Owners
After we published our grower statement, the comments filled up with one question above all others: what did you two actually pay yourselves?
The answer is nothing. The business lost more than $30,000 last year. But the follow-up question was sharper, and fairer: why pay a management company at all when you could do the work yourselves?
The Management Fee Question
It is a reasonable challenge. We could handle the cultural care ourselves: the irrigation checks, the weed control, the fertilizer, the pruning. Plenty of grove owners do.
We pay for professional management because it is a strategic choice rather than a convenience. It keeps the trees on a consistent schedule regardless of what else the week demands, and it means the grove is not hostage to one person’s calendar.
Market-Based Wages, and Why They Change the Picture
A book called Simple Numbers by Greg Crabtree reframed this for us. The core idea is the market-based wage: what would it cost to replace you if you could not do the work?
Run our grove through that lens and the picture clarifies. If we paid ourselves a genuine market wage for the labor we contribute, the business would still be in the hole. The management fee is not what is causing the loss. It is simply making visible a cost that most owner-operated farms hide by quietly working for free.
That distinction matters, because a farm that only works when the owner donates their labor is not a farm you can hand to anyone. I will not be able to physically work this grove forever. Understanding the real replacement cost now is how we find out whether the operation stands on its own.
What We Are Building Toward
We are a family of four in North San Diego County. The farm has to eventually support a sustainable income, not just break even on paper. The target we are working toward is a grove that clears $60,000 to $70,000 annually after all expenses, including paying the people who run it.
Whether you are running an avocado grove or a software company, the underlying business principles do not change. Know your real costs. Pay market wages, even to yourself, at least on paper. Then decide whether the thing works.
Why Is Avocado Farm Income So Hard to Predict?
Part of the answer is the tree itself. Avocados are alternate bearers: a heavy crop uses up the shoots that would have flowered the following spring, so a big year tends to be followed by a light one. The UC handbook Avocado Production in California cites research in which 46% of shoots flowered in an “on” year against just 13% in an “off” year.
The swings can be dramatic. The handbook gives the record of one 10-acre Hass grove that averaged 8,752 pounds per acre over five years, with individual years as high as 20,995 pounds per acre and as low as 1,813. Weather adds its own shocks: a heat wave over 105°F in late May or June can drop almost all of the newly set fruit, and a damaging freeze arrives roughly once a decade. The December 1990 freeze alone cost the state at least 20% of its crop.
That is why we do not judge the grove on one statement. Any single year can be a high or a low; the real question is what the average looks like over several.
The Costs That Do Not Flex
Revenue swings with the crop, but most costs do not. Water is the largest. Even with drip irrigation, a mature acre of avocados needs at least 4,500 gallons a day in summer in most inland Southern California areas, and water was already $1,100 an acre-foot in Fallbrook by 2012. With most San Diego County groves needing about 3 to 3.5 acre-feet per acre a year, that came to roughly $3,300 to $3,900 an acre for water alone. The handbook describes what followed in San Diego County bluntly: a “downward spiral of groves going out of business.” We go through the water side in our guide to watering avocado trees.
Tree size is another fixed cost. Big avocado trees make picking slower and more hazardous, so pruning becomes a necessary practice, and the handbook notes it adds considerably to production costs. Its pruning chapter is frank that pruning is not a yield booster either: avocado pruning trials had not been shown to increase yield per acre, so the payback is cheaper, safer picking and better spray coverage. Replanting is not cheap either: trees on clonal, root-rot-tolerant rootstocks cost about twice as much as trees on seedling rootstocks. None of that goes away in a light year, which is why paying ourselves a market wage on paper is such a useful test. We compared our own costs with published research in our numbers vs UC Davis.
Why We Are Transparent About It
Most farm content shows you the sunset over the rows and skips the spreadsheet. We would rather show both. If you are weighing whether to buy land and grow something, you deserve the actual numbers, not the version that sells a dream.
It is the same reason we sell direct. When a box goes from our grove to your kitchen without a middleman, you know exactly who grew it and what it took.
This is part of our complete guide to what it really costs to run a California avocado farm — the grower statement, farm gate pricing, and the numbers behind a family grove.
