Estimating the Economic Feasibility of Producing Blackberries for Four Different Production Systems

As health concerns are on the rise, consumer behavior regarding food, nutrition and health benefits are changing. In 2013, the three leading causes of death in the United States were heart disease, cancer, and chronic lower respiratory diseases (Kochanek et al., 2014). Numerous research studies support the blackberry potential role in helping to reduce the risk of these diseases (Manganaris et al., 2014; Seeram 2010; Seeram 2008; Seeram et al., 2006). Blackberry’s health benefits had stimulated domestic consumption and consequently an increase in production in the United States (Safley, Boldea, and Fernandez, 2006). However, production of blackberries requires a high initial investment and a delay of three years in returns after planting. The goal of this poster is introduce an interactive tool that allows blackberry producers evaluating cost, returns and run breakeven, sensitivity or risk analyses for four different production systems (e.g., floricane high tunnel production, primocane high tunnel production, floricane field production and primocane field production). This tool was developed in Microsoft Excel using VBA interfaces for simplified data entry. The user-friendly interfaces allow the producer to generate tabular and graphical information that highlights estimated costs and returns. However, the tool is flexible enough to assess the changes to cost, revenue and risk as expected costs, revenue prices and/or yields change using the tool’s default data or information entered by the user. This tool is useful because it allows blackberry producers to estimate operating costs, fixed costs, total costs and expected total returns by modifying production practices or production systems, cost or return values. Estimating total costs per year, breakeven, sensitivity and risk analyses for yields and prices would assist blackberry producers to make better production, management and marketing decisions when comparing production costs and revenues of different production systems.