Budget for a Hard Clam Culture Operation
Existing or prospective hard clam growers can create an annual budget that allows them to determine investment needs, operating costs, revenue, and profit associated with a commercial culture operation. The Excel spreadsheet describes the production and financial assumptions used for planting, growing, and harvesting operations. The user can adjust key assumptions and input values, such as seed price, harvest size distribution, survival rate, and market price, so that a customized analysis is possible. Since farm sizes vary, number of acres is not designated in this spreadsheet. What drives this is the number of seed planted with the default value of one million, the upper limit for a one-acre operation. Thus, investment and variable cost values are associated with a given number of seed planted, not necessarily the acreage involved.
