---
title: "Minutes Per Tray: The Cost Every Microgreens Business Plan Leaves Out"
description: "Two institutions publish a per-tray time, 6.8 to 9.5 minutes and 15. At real wages that is $2.21 to $5.00 of labor against a median $1.09 of seed, so labor is half to two thirds of a tray's cost."
url: "https://microgreensguru.com/selling-microgreens/guides/labor-and-time-per-tray/"
lang: "en"
published: "2026-08-12"
modified: "2026-08-12"
image: "https://microgreensguru.com/og/selling-microgreens-guides-labor-and-time-per-tray.jpg"
---

# Minutes Per Tray: The Cost Every Microgreens Business Plan Leaves Out

[Cal Hewitt](https://microgreensguru.com/about/cal-hewitt/)Published August 12, 2026

- labor
- costs
- business planning
- selling microgreens

**Labor is the largest cost of a tray and the one most business plans leave out.**

Seed has a price you can look up. So does medium, and a kilowatt-hour has a published national average. The hours do not, so a plan built from the priced inputs alone looks profitable and is not. Working out your own minutes per tray is the single most useful number you can put against this crop.

## What to actually do

- **Time your own trays before trusting anyone's figure, including these.** Nobody has published a real time study of microgreen production, so your own log is the best evidence that will ever exist for your operation.
- **Log the tasks separately**, because they do not scale together. Sowing batches; harvesting does not.
- **Include the selling.** It is the block every published figure leaves out and the grower account that included it came in at three times the production-only estimates.
- **Price your own hour explicitly**, at what you would have to pay somebody else. An unpriced owner-hour is how a plan shows a profit that is really a wage.
- **Watch the fixed work on fast crops.** A seven-day crop costs nearly three times the labor per shelf-day of a twenty-day one.
- **If the harvest step dominates your log, that is the one place a tool has a published estimate**, at 2.7 minutes a tray, with a cut-quality trade-off.
- **Do not use a profit calculator that will not tell you its labor assumption.** Four published sources use four different ones and the answer changes materially between them.

## What two institutions actually publish

**Two per-tray figures exist from institutional sources, and they are not the same kind of number.**

The only institutional per-tray times published

| Source | Minutes per tray | What it is |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Penn State Extension, scissors | **9.5** | A course estimate broken into named tasks |
| Penn State Extension, electric clippers | **6.8** | The same tasks with a faster harvest step |
| Missouri Extension, 2024 enterprise budget | **15** | A budget **input assumption**, not a measurement |

**One farm adds a crop split for harvest and packing alone.** Fat Peach Farm in New Hampshire, in a USDA SARE farmer grant report with UNH Cooperative Extension for winter 2020 to 21, named harvesting and packing its biggest variable cost at **15 minutes per microgreen tray and 5 minutes per pea shoot tray**, without saying how the minutes were measured ([SARE FNE20-966](https://projects.sare.org/project-reports/fne20-966/)). It is one farm and only those two tasks, so it sits beside the table rather than in it.

**Penn State is the only source that breaks a tray into tasks**, which is what makes it useful even though it is an estimate rather than a study:

- **Planting: 3.3 minutes**
- **Irrigation and fertilization: 0.5**
- **Harvest: 4.0 with scissors, or 1.3 with electric clippers**
- **Packing and distribution: 1.7**

**Read what is missing from that list**, because it is most of a business: no tray washing, no delivery route, no selling, no administration, no crop checks. Penn State names its included tasks and does not claim otherwise. **Missouri gives no task breakdown at all** and calls its 15 minutes an assumption.

**One grower figure covers the whole job.** A 2019 practice account puts it at **30 minutes including making the sale**, and separately says a market day is a full day and home delivery half a day.

**So, the apparent range is 6.8 to 30 minutes, and it is not a range.** It is production-only against production-plus-selling, an estimate against an assumption against a recollection, across different systems. **Averaging those four numbers would produce a figure describing nothing.**

## What that costs, against what this site already publishes

**Convert the minutes at real wages and set them beside the seed.**

Labor per tray against seed per tray, computed 2026-08-12

| Labor figure | Cost per tray | Against the cheapest crop ($0.31) | Against the median ($1.09) |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Penn State, electric clippers | **$2.21** | **7.1x** | **2.0x** |
| Penn State, scissors | **$3.09** | **10.0x** | **2.8x** |
| Missouri budget assumption | **$5.00** | **16.1x** | **4.6x** |

**The Penn State figures use the 2025 USDA all-hired gross wage of $19.52 an hour. Missouri's $5.00 is its own published input at $20.**

**Seed is the input this category talks about and it is the smallest one.** Across the [50 costed crops in this directory](https://microgreensguru.com/microgreen-types/), the cheapest tray of seed is [turnip](https://microgreensguru.com/microgreen-types/turnip/) at **$0.31** and the median is **$1.09**. On turnip, the labor to grow the tray costs seven to sixteen times the seed in it.

**Put the whole cash input together and the proportion is the finding.** Take the median seed at $1.09 and the cheapest single-use mat from [the growing medium review](https://microgreensguru.com/product-reviews/growing-medium/) at $1.18:

Labor as a share of a tray's total cost

| Labor figure | Labor | Total tray cost | Labor's share |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Penn State, electric clippers | $2.21 | $4.47 | **49 percent** |
| Penn State, scissors | $3.09 | $5.35 | **58 percent** |
| Missouri budget assumption | $5.00 | $7.26 | **69 percent** |

**Between half and two thirds of what a tray costs is time**, on the most defensible figures available, and none of those figures includes delivery or selling. **The real share is higher.**

## The fixed work is why a fast crop is not a cheap one

**Sowing a tray takes the same 3.3 minutes whether the crop finishes in six days or twenty.** So does cleaning it afterwards. That work is fixed per cycle, and a short cycle runs more cycles.

Penn State's 9.5 minutes, spread across the days the tray occupies a shelf

| Crop length | Labor per tray-day |
| --- | --- |
| 7 days | **1.36 minutes** |
| 12 days | **0.79 minutes** |
| 20 days | **0.47 minutes** |

**A seven-day crop costs nearly three times the labor per day of shelf time that a twenty-day crop does.**

**That runs directly into the finding on [the harvest stage page](https://microgreensguru.com/grow-microgreens/harvest-stage-and-what-changes/)**, where waiting from first to second true leaf raised [mizuna](https://microgreensguru.com/microgreen-types/mizuna/)'s yield 80.1 percent and its cycle from 7 days to 12, leaving yield per tray-day only 5.1 percent better. **Read the two together and the case for waiting improves**, because the longer cycle also spreads the fixed labor over more days. Neither page can close that argument, because nobody has published the labor and the yield for the same tray.

## The one tool difference anyone has estimated

**Electric clippers cut the harvest step from 4.0 minutes to 1.3** in Penn State's estimates, which it made from students rather than clocking a working farm: 2.7 minutes less, or **67.5 percent shorter for that task**.

**Penn State also reports poorer cut precision and more tissue damage with them**, so the fastest tool carries a quality trade-off, and this site has [already established](https://microgreensguru.com/grow-microgreens/how-to-harvest-microgreens/) that cut height is a real safety control.

**Nothing else has been timed.** Virginia Extension lists automatic, tabletop and vacuum seeders and several harvester types and gives no savings figures for any of them. **A vendor selling a thing is not a measurement that it saves time.**

## What a plan should actually do with this

**Packing and distribution is 1.7 minutes in Penn State's list**, which is 17.9 percent of the scissors workflow and 25.0 percent of the electric one. **That is a share of the listed production tasks and not of the business**, because the same source lists no selling time at all.

**The published profit claims all rest on a chosen labor assumption rather than an observed one.** Missouri assumes 15 minutes at $20. Penn State's tasks total 6.8 to 9.5 at $12. A commercial calculator claims 12 to 18 minutes at $20 while stating that its model excludes delivery, taxes and financing. A grower illustration uses 30 minutes including the sale at a desired $30 an hour.

**The lesson is not that one of those is right.** It is that a margin claim moves materially with the task scope and the wage assigned to the owner's time, and none of those pages shows you which it chose.

**Work it from the other end instead.** Required weekly sales equal your target hourly earnings times the hours you want, divided by the contribution per tray. At **$25 an hour for 20 hours**, with a **$20 tray** and **$5 of non-labor cash cost**, contribution is $15 and you need **34 sold trays a week**. **Then check the labor separately**: 34 trays at Missouri's 15 minutes is 8.5 production hours, leaving the rest of your 20 for [everything Penn State's list omits](https://microgreensguru.com/blog/microgreens-side-hustle/).

## What nobody has measured

- **A real time study of microgreen production.** Not one exists: what is published is a course estimate, a budget assumption, one farm's grant report and grower recollections.
- **Minutes per tray at different weekly volumes**, holding crop, system and channel constant. Everyone asserts that scale improves efficiency and nobody has measured the curve.
- **A hiring threshold.** One commercial calculator asserts that 200 trays a week needs 30 to 40 owner hours plus 15 to 20 part-time hours, and supplies no method or operating case.
- **Washing and packing as a share of total business time.** Only of the listed production tasks.
- **Any tool comparison beyond scissors against electric clippers.**
- **Labor and yield for the same tray**, which is the pairing that would settle whether a longer cycle pays.

### Terms on this page

**Per-tray against per-batch.** A task done once per tray against one done once for many. Sowing is per tray; mixing medium is per batch. They scale completely differently.

**Fixed work per cycle.** Work that costs the same regardless of how long the crop takes, which is what makes a fast crop expensive in labor.

**Tray-day.** One tray occupying one shelf space for one day. The unit that makes labor and yield comparable against the time they cost.

**Contribution per tray.** Selling price minus the cash cost of that tray, before fixed overhead. What you divide a target income by.

**Enterprise budget.** A planning model published by an extension service. Its inputs are assumptions, clearly labeled as such, and are not measurements.

**Opportunity cost.** What the owner's hour would earn elsewhere. Leaving it out is the most common way a microgreen plan overstates profit.

**Time study.** A structured measurement of how long tasks take, with a stated sample and method. Nobody has published one for this crop.

## Sources

Opened 2026-08-12. The cost-per-tray conversions, the shares of total tray cost and the tray-day figures are arithmetic performed for this page on the published times and wages named below, set against seed and medium costs this site already publishes. The seed figures were recomputed on 2026-08-12 across the 50 crop entries that carry a costed tray.

- [Penn State Extension, growing microgreens](https://extension.psu.edu/growing-microgreens) - the per-tray task estimates of 3.3 minutes for planting, 0.5 for irrigation and fertilization, 4.0 for scissors harvest against 1.3 for electric clippers, and 1.7 for packing and distribution, priced there at $12 an hour, with the note of poorer cut precision and tissue damage from electric clippers. The source attributes the labor to students, so it is a published institutional estimate rather than an independently replicated time study, and it is dated to the page as accessed rather than represented as a 2026 measurement.
- [University of Missouri Extension, vegetable crop budgets (PDF)](https://extension.missouri.edu/media/wysiwyg/Extensiondata/Pub/pdf/agguides/agecon/g00693.pdf) - the 15 minutes per tray at $20 an hour, producing $5.00 of labor per harvested 1020 tray across five crops, and its own statement that this is a budget input assumption.
- [USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, Farm Labor, May 2025 (PDF)](https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/reports/fmla0525.pdf) - the 2025 all-hired gross wage of $19.52 an hour used for the Penn State conversions.
- [Virginia Cooperative Extension, introduction to microgreen production](https://www.pubs.ext.vt.edu/SPES/spes-756.html) - the list of automatic, tabletop and vacuum seeders and of tabletop, stationary tray and conveyor harvesters, published without any timing or savings measurement, which is the basis for this page declining to claim one.
- Grower and commercial pages, used as practice only: [GroCycle, microgreens business guide, 2019 (PDF)](https://grocycle.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Microgreens-Business.pdf), the source of the 30 minutes including the sale, the full-day market and half-day delivery statements, and the advice to start below 20 trays a week; and [a commercial microgreens profit calculator](https://farmzz.com/en/blog/microgreens-profit-calculator), which claims 12 to 18 minutes per tray at $20 an hour and 30 to 40 owner hours plus 15 to 20 part-time hours at 200 trays a week, while stating that its model excludes delivery, taxes and financing. Both are marketing or recollection rather than measurement and are labeled as such above.

## Keep reading

- Selling guides

    ### Electricity and Water: The Lights Were 3 Percent of the Bill

    In the one published microgreen room with a metered breakdown, air conditioning took 150 kWh of 188.4 and two LED lamps took 5.4. And US rates run 12.35 to 52.00 cents, so a national average is nearly useless.

    [Read Electricity and Water: The Lights Were 3 Percent of the Bill](https://microgreensguru.com/selling-microgreens/guides/electricity-and-water-costs/)
- Selling guides

    ### Microgreens Profit and Margins: What Missouri's Enterprise Budget Shows

    University of Missouri Extension's budget models income over total cost at $5.84 to $19.45 a tray, for one greenhouse system at Missouri rates. Promotional pages quote $12 to $54, which is revenue rather than profit.

    [Read Microgreens Profit and Margins: What Missouri's Enterprise Budget Shows](https://microgreensguru.com/selling-microgreens/guides/profit-and-margins/)
- Selling guides

    ### What to Charge for Microgreens: Every Observed Price, in One Unit

    Converted to one unit, the observed prices run from $2.65 to $22.05 per 100 g, an 8.3-fold spread. At the bottom of it a tray has to yield 3 to 7 ounces just to cover its own labor.

    [Read What to Charge for Microgreens: Every Observed Price, in One Unit](https://microgreensguru.com/selling-microgreens/guides/pricing-and-what-to-charge/)
- The journal

    ### How Much Does an AeroGarden Cost? A First-Year Breakdown

    Wondering how much an AeroGarden costs? See the real first-year total for the garden, electricity, plant food, and seed pods, added up on one basis.

    [Read How Much Does an AeroGarden Cost? A First-Year Breakdown](https://microgreensguru.com/blog/how-much-does-an-aerogarden-cost/)