Free tool
Garlic planting labour cost calculator
Work out what hand-planting actually costs you this fall, and how many seasons a planter takes to pay for itself on your acreage. Adjust every number to your own farm — the defaults are only a starting point.
Read this before you trust the number
It comes down to what your crew does by hand
A ride-on planter does not multiply one person’s output the way a combine does. Two people ride the PL-22 and each places 600 to 800 cloves an hour. So the honest comparison is 600–800 cloves per rider-hour against whatever your crew manages on their knees — and if your crew is faster than that, the machine will not cut your labour bill.
Most published hand-planting figures count only dropping cloves into a furrow somebody else opened. Our number covers the whole job, because the machine opens the furrow, meters the spacing and closes the row as well. Compare like for like.
| If hand-planting runs at | Hand labour-hours | Hand labour cost | The machine saves |
|---|---|---|---|
| 400/hr | 1,307 | $23,522 | $10,081 |
| 500/hr | 1,045 | $18,818 | $5,377 |
| 600/hr | 871 | $15,682 | $2,240 |
| 700/hr | 747 | $13,441 | $0 |
| 1,000/hr | 523 | $9,409 | −$4,032 |
Break-even is roughly 700 cloves per person-hour by hand. Slower than that and the machine pays. Faster and it does not — at least not on labour-hours alone, which is not the only reason growers buy one.
The case that doesn’t depend on the labour math
Every one of these holds regardless of what the per-rider rate turns out to be.
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You need fewer people, not fewer hours
The binding constraint on most small farms in October is not the wage bill — it is finding four reliable people who will kneel in a field for two weeks. A machine that lets two people do the job of four is worth more than the arithmetic suggests, because the other two do not exist.
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The rate holds all day
A thousand cloves an hour is a fresh-crew number. By hour six on your knees it is not. Seated operators sustain their rate, which means the estimate you plan around is the one you actually get.
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Every clove goes in the right way up
Misoriented cloves produce bent necks and undersized bulbs you pay to grade out ten months later. That cost never shows up in a planting-day labour calculation, and it is real money.
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Your crew comes back next year
Hand-planting garlic is the job people quit over. That has a cost you feel in recruiting every single season.
Cloves per acre by spacing
An acre is 43,560 square feet, or 6,272,640 square inches. Divide by your spacing to get the count.
| In-row × between-row | Cloves per acre | Hand-planting hours per acre |
|---|---|---|
| 4" × 6" | 261,360 | 261 |
| 4" × 8" | 196,020 | 196 |
| 6" × 6" | 174,240 | 174 |
| 6" × 8" | 130,680 | 131 |
| 8" × 8" | 98,010 | 98 |
Hours assume 1,000 cloves per person per hour. If you plant in beds with pathways, calculate the planted area only — a 4-foot bed with a 2-foot path is 67% planted ground.
When a planter does not make sense
Under about an acre, the math rarely works. A single acre at 6″ × 6″ is around 174 hours by hand — real work, but one crew-week, and the machine will take many seasons to pay back at that scale.
If you plant on plastic mulch with a bed layout the planter cannot be configured for, tell us before you buy, not after.
And if your constraint is land, seed stock or market access rather than labour, a planter does not solve your problem. Call us and we will tell you straight.
Tell us about your beds
Get a quote
Send us your row spacing, bed width, tractor horsepower and how many acres you plant. We will tell you exactly how we would configure a machine for you — and if we are not the right fit, we will say so.