Vertical Farm Yield Projector

Total Grow Area is your floor footprint multiplied by the number of tiers — a 500 sq ft footprint with 4 stacked levels gives 2,000 sq ft of actual growing surface on the same 500 sq ft of land. Annual Harvest is then computed from that multiplied total area, not the floor footprint, which is what lets vertical farms produce far more per acre of land than a single growing level.

It's simply 365 divided by your entered crop cycles per year, giving you the average days each cycle would need to hit that annual count. It's a sanity check — lettuce typically runs 25-35 days per cycle, so if your cycles-per-year input implies a much shorter or longer cycle than that, it's worth double-checking the assumption before trusting the harvest projection.

It divides your projected annual pounds by a flat 20,000 lbs/acre/year benchmark for outdoor lettuce production, giving a rough sense of how much open farmland your system replaces. That benchmark is specific to lettuce-type yields — real outdoor yields vary widely by crop, climate, and growing method, so treat this as a pitch-deck talking point rather than an apples-to-apples land comparison for other crops.

It multiplies your annual pounds harvested by a flat $3/lb, which is a placeholder price for leafy greens used purely for financial modeling — it isn't pulled from any market data. Actual wholesale and retail prices for microgreens, herbs, and specialty greens can run several times higher or lower than $3/lb, so swap in your own expected sale price when doing real financial planning.

Every output — Annual Harvest, Harvest per Cycle, Estimated Revenue — is a linear multiple of your entered yield density (lbs per sq ft per cycle), since the underlying formula is just total area × cycles × yield density. That means the yield-per-cycle figure you enter is the single biggest driver of accuracy here, and first-pass projections using a textbook estimate should be refined once you have real harvest data from your own system.