The Pea Market in 2026: Acres, Yields, Prices

Before anything else, a pea business plan has to answer one question honestly: which pea business is this? The word covers three trades that share a plant and almost nothing else.

• Vining peas — grown green, harvested by a mobile viner and frozen within hours. Sold on a fixed processor contract agreed before drilling. There is no spot market.
• Combinable (dry/field) peas — left to mature and cut with a combine, sold by the hundredweight or tonne into food, feed, seed or a protein isolate contract.
• Fresh-market and direct-sale peas — garden, snap, snow and shelling peas sold to boxes, restaurants, farm shops and markets at a large multiple of commodity value, on a fraction of the acreage.

Plans that blur these three read as if the founder has never sold a load, and lenders spot it in the first page. The financial shape is completely different: a vining grower's revenue line is a contract, a combinable grower's revenue line is a price series, and a direct grower's revenue line is a marketing operation with a farm attached.

The 2025 US crop, and what it did to price

The last full US season was a genuine outlier and the numbers matter to anyone modelling 2026. Dry pea planted area rose 21% to 1.18 million acres, and production climbed 23% to 20.6 million cwt, on an average yield of 1,814 pounds per acre — up 39 pounds, or 2%, on the year (USDA ERS, Vegetables and Pulses Outlook, 2025). More acres and a better yield on each of them is a record-crop recipe, and the market responded exactly as you would expect. The Minnesota/North Dakota average dry pea price fell 45% to $18.84 per cwt (USDA ERS, 2025).

Read that pair of facts together and you have the strategic point most pea guides never make. Peas are not a crop you plan around a price. They are a crop where the price can halve in a season on domestic supply alone, because the demand side — pet food, split pea food trade, export pulse buyers, protein isolate plants — does not expand 23% in a year to meet you. A plan with a flat price across five forecast years is telling a lender it has not read the series. Which means a pea plan is judged on its downside case: show the bank what the farm does at $16/cwt, because 2025 proves the market can get there.

What is actually growing: protein, not acres

The structural demand story sits downstream. Estimates of the global pea protein market vary widely by scope and methodology — from roughly $1.4 billion to about $3.3 billion for 2025 — with Fortune Business Insights, 2025 at the upper end of that range. Forecast growth is more consistent than the base: Custom Market Insights, 2025 models an 11.84% CAGR to 2034, and most published forecasts cluster between 8% and 12%.

Treat those numbers with care. A $3.3 billion isolate market is a processor's market, not a grower's. What it means for a farm is narrower and more useful: there is a buyer class paying above commodity for identity-preserved, non-GMO, contracted peas. PURIS, the largest North American pea protein producer, runs a 200,000 sq ft plant at Dawson, Minnesota and sources from over 400 farmers across 14 states using its own proprietary non-GMO seed; Cargill has put more than $100 million into the business (Cargill, 2019). Roquette holds the comparable European-owned capacity and opened a large pea protein facility at Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. Those two, plus handlers like Columbia Grain and AGT Foods, are the realistic answer to "who buys your crop" — and that answer belongs in the plan by name, not as "regional buyers".

The UK picture is a contract market, not a commodity one

British pea farming splits harder than the American version. On the vining side, the numbers are tight and well documented: vining peas occupy 40,000–50,000 hectares in the UK and produce 160,000–200,000 tonnes for the frozen market, worth roughly £56–£70 million at the farm gate each year (PGRO). Planned yields sit around 4–5 tonnes per hectare, and five years of PGRO trials with the Green Pea Company showed cover cropping ahead of the peas can add up to 1.5 t/ha (PGRO, 2021).

But the constraint is geography, not agronomy. The Green Pea Company is Birds Eye's sole supplier into the Hull freezing plant and draws its crop from north Lincolnshire up through eastern Yorkshire, within roughly a 35-mile radius of the factory, because Birds Eye, 2023 runs a picked-to-frozen window of 150 minutes. If your land is not inside a viner's catchment, the vining market is closed to you and no business plan changes that. Write it down as a constraint and move to combinable or direct.

The direct route is where the interesting British margin has been. Hodmedod's, founded in 2012 at Brampton in Suffolk, co-produces with around 25 UK farmers and built a retail market for crops the trade had written off — including Carlin peas sold as "Black Badger". It took the BBC Food & Farming Award for best food producer in 2017, and grew sales of several lines roughly 40–50x in five years. That is not a commodity outcome; it is what happens when a grower stops selling a pea and starts selling a product.

Questions Growers Ask Before They Drill

These come up in almost every pea conversation we have, and the honest answers are shorter and more specific than the internet suggests.

How many acres of peas do you need to make money?

The wrong question, and it is why so many plans stall. On a standalone commodity basis at 2025 prices, more acres of peas simply multiplies a thin or negative margin. Peas make money at the rotation level, not the acre level: enough pea ground to give a meaningful share of your cereals a legume entry, harvested with kit you already own or can hire. For most northern-plains operations that lands between 15% and 30% of the cropped area. On the fresh/direct side the arithmetic inverts entirely — 5 to 10 acres can carry a business, because you sell at retail multiples and the constraint is picking labour and market access, not land.

How much do peas sell for per hundredweight?

The 2025 marketing-year average for Minnesota and North Dakota was $18.84 per cwt, a 45% fall (USDA ERS, 2025). Model it as your floor, not your expectation. Green versus yellow class, contract versus open commodity, and delivered-to-plant versus farmgate all move the number materially.

Is pea farming profitable?

Sometimes as a crop, usually as a rotation. The 15–35% margin ranges quoted online typically describe fresh or value-added models, not a commodity year at $18.84. The defensible answer for a lender: the pea enterprise is thin and volatile, and the rotation it enables is where the return sits. Worked through with real numbers in the revenue section below.

Do peas need nitrogen fertiliser?

Barely, and that is the whole commercial point. Peas partner with Rhizobium bacteria and fix up to 180 kg of nitrogen per hectare from the air, so you buy inoculant instead — a fraction of the cost. The residue carries that nitrogen to the next crop: wheat after field pea accumulated 96.7% more nitrogen than wheat after wheat (Agronomy, 2025).

Can you get an SBA loan to start a pea farm?

Usually not, and asking signals inexperience. SBA has traditionally declined to lend to farmers where USDA and Farm Credit lenders can serve the borrower, so a pure growing operation goes to the Farm Service Agency — microloans up to $50,000, direct operating around 5.25% as posted in January 2026 (USDA FSA, 2026). SBA 7(a) becomes relevant only when you bolt on something that is not farming. For the record, SBA's size standard for NAICS 111130, Dry Pea and Bean Farming, is $1,000,000 in revenue — eligibility is the obstacle, not scale.

What is the difference between vining peas and combinable peas?

Vining peas are cut green at a precise tenderometer window by a contractor's mobile viner and frozen within hours; you never own a marketing decision, only a contract. Combinable peas mature in the field, are cut with your own combine, stored, and sold when you choose. Vining is a logistics business with an agronomy component; combinable is an agronomy business with a marketing component. Your plan should not pretend to be both.

What It Costs to Put Peas in the Ground

Startup capital for a pea operation runs roughly $32,000 to $210,000 (£25,000 to £165,000), and the spread is not a hedge — it is the gap between two different businesses. A 5–10 acre fresh or direct-market operation comes in around $30,000–$80,000 excluding land. A 300-acre leased combinable operation carries roughly $180,000 of equipment and annual operating costs near $320 per acre covering seed, fertiliser, crop protection and labour. Decide which one you are before you fill in a single cell.

Line-by-line, with the numbers that move

• Seed and inoculant — $38–$60/acre (£95–£150/ha). Peas are drilled heavy: roughly 35–40 kg of seed per acre, rows about a foot apart, seed 3–4 inches apart at 2–3 cm depth. That seed rate is why peas look expensive per acre at the drill and cheap per acre at the fertiliser shed. Rhizobium inoculant is the cheapest line on this list and the one most likely to cost you the crop if you skip it on virgin pea ground.
• Machinery — $45K–$180K owned, or $28–$40/acre custom-hired. The single decision that most changes your funding ask. Custom-hiring drilling and combining converts a capital request into an operating cost, keeps you inside FSA microloan territory, and is almost always the right first-season answer for a new entrant.
• Land — $65–$180/acre lease (£150–£260/ha). Well-drained ground, pH 6.0–7.5, sandy loam through clay. Peas hate wet feet and hate their own residue; a tight rotation is a disease bill deferred, not avoided.
• Crop protection and certification — $28–$55/acre plus a $75–$150 applicator licence in the US; in the UK, PA1 plus PA2 or PA6 certificates (costed in the licensing section).
• Storage, drying, handling — $18K–$60K, or zero if you deliver straight to an elevator or processor and accept their timing.
• Working capital — $25K–$70K. The line new growers underfund. Peas do not pay on delivery; settlement commonly runs 60–120 days behind. Your plan needs a cash flow that survives the gap between harvest and money.
• Insurance, entity, records — $4K–$11K. Federal crop insurance through USDA RMA is available on dry peas in the main producing states, and the sales closing date falls before planting, so it is a diary item, not an afterthought.

How pea farms actually get funded

Most pea guides open the funding section with "SBA 7(a) loans up to $5M". For a grower, that is close to useless. SBA has historically declined to lend where USDA and Farm Credit can serve the borrower, so a pure growing operation goes to the Farm Service Agency.

• FSA Microloan — up to $50,000, with eased managerial-experience requirements and lighter paperwork, explicitly designed for small, beginning and non-traditional operations. General operating and family living costs are repaid within 12 months or when the commodity sells; equipment terms run up to 7 years. Direct operating rates were around 5.25% in January 2026 (USDA FSA, 2026).
• FSA Direct and Guaranteed Operating / Ownership loans for anything larger. Direct loans come from FSA; guaranteed loans come from a USDA-approved lender with FSA backing. Compared with SBA, FSA generally means lower rates and lower fees but lower caps.
• SBA 7(a) — genuinely on the table once there is a processing facility, a value-added product line or agritourism attached to the farm. If that is your model, say so explicitly; it changes the lender and the plan.
• Processor contracts as quasi-financing. A signed identity-preserved contract with a buyer such as PURIS is the strongest single document in a pea funding pack. It converts your revenue line from a forecast into an obligation, and lenders price that difference.
• UK routes — Start Up Loans up to £25,000 at 6% fixed for a new entrant, plus commercial agricultural lending, machinery leasing and grower co-operative membership. In practice a UK vining plan is financed on the strength of the contract, not the balance sheet.

Get your FSA farm number and acreage report in place first. It is free, it takes a visit, and it is the prerequisite for loans, crop insurance and most programmes.

Where Peas Actually Pay: State & County Detail

US pea production is not spread thinly across the country; it is concentrated to the point that "national average" is a misleading planning input. In 2025, North Dakota produced 9.19 million cwt, up 30% — close to half the entire US crop on its own. Montana rose 13%. Idaho doubled planted acreage to 22,000 acres while its yield fell 11%, a useful reminder that acres and output are not the same conversation (USDA ERS, 2025).

The planning lesson is blunt: name your county, your nearest viner or elevator, and the freight distance to the plant. Those three facts persuade a lender more than any amount of market-size prose, because they determine whether the crop clears.

Revenue, Margin and the Rotation Credit

Here is the number most pea business plans stop at, and it is why most pea business plans get declined.

The worked example lenders actually read

Take 640 acres of dry peas at the 2025 national average yield of 1,814 lb/acre — that is 11.6 cwt per acre. At the 2025 MN/ND average of $18.84/cwt, gross pea revenue is $218.54 per acre, or $139,866 across the block. Now subtract direct costs at roughly $320/acre. The crop is about $101 per acre underwater. Farm-wide, that is a loss north of $64,000 on peas alone.

Every honest pea plan hits this wall. The ones that get funded do not argue with the arithmetic; they finish it.

Booking the nitrogen

Peas fix up to 180 kg of nitrogen per hectare and leave residue whose nitrogen content sits far above cereal residue. The consequence is measurable rather than theoretical: wheat after field pea accumulated 96.7% more nitrogen than continuously cropped wheat, and a spring wheat–pea rotation raised wheat plant density, biomass, grain yield and harvest index by 23–40% versus continuous spring wheat (Agronomy, 2025).

So the following wheat crop needs roughly 60–90 lb/acre less applied nitrogen, worth about $42–$63 per acre at ordinary fertiliser pricing — and it yields more on top. Book that credit into the pea enterprise instead of quietly letting it show up as a wheat cost saving, and the same 640 acres moves from roughly $101/acre negative to roughly $30–$60 per acre net positive, before any yield uplift on the wheat is counted at all.

This is not accounting sleight of hand — it is the actual economic logic of why the northern plains grow peas. Research on pulse rotations makes the wider case: nitrogen-fixing crops in a wheat rotation reduce income variability, lift soil carbon, and cut weed and disease pressure through diversity. A lender who understands agriculture is looking for exactly this reasoning and marks you down quietly when it is missing.

The four revenue lines worth modelling

• Commodity dry pea sales. Volatile, liquid, and the honest baseline. Split by green and yellow class — they do not track each other. Assume settlement 60–120 days out.
• Identity-preserved protein contracts. Above-commodity pricing in exchange for proprietary non-GMO seed, segregation and traceability. PURIS's 400-plus grower network across 14 states is the model. The premium is real; the compliance is real too, and belongs in your cost lines.
• Vining contracts. Fixed, pre-agreed, and geographically gated. Zero marketing risk, zero marketing upside, total dependence on one counterparty. Model it as a fee-for-service, because that is what it is.
• Direct and value-added. The Hodmedod's route — variety choice, brand, provenance, direct customer relationships. Highest margin per acre by a distance, but it is a food business, and the plan needs a marketing operation in it, not a farm with a stall.

Published margin ranges of 15–35% of gross revenue circulate widely for pea operations, and fresh-market green peas are quoted anywhere from $500 to $2,000 per acre. Use those as scenario boundaries, not forecasts, and state which model each figure describes. A lender who sees a $2,000/acre fresh-market figure carried into a 640-acre combinable model will stop reading, and they will be right to.

Licences, Assurance and Contracts

Pea compliance is unusual in that the hardest requirement is not a licence at all — it is a contract. But the paperwork still needs to be right, and there is one error repeated across nearly every pea guide on the internet that we will correct below.

United States

The critical distinction is that FSMA does not treat all peas the same way. FDA's Produce Safety Rule has an exhaustive list of produce "rarely consumed raw", and mature southern field peas — black-eyed, cowpea, crowder, purple hull, sea island, silver and speckled peas — are on it and therefore exempt (FDA). Fresh green peas, snap peas and snow peas sold to be eaten raw are covered produce and pull in agricultural water standards, worker training, hygiene and records. The same farm can sit on both sides of the line in the same season. If your plan says "we comply with FSMA" without saying which peas, an assessor knows you have not read the rule.

• FSMA Produce Safety Rule — FDA, enforced through state departments of agriculture. Grower training roughly $150–$250 plus ongoing water testing and records. Applies from the first covered harvest. Coverage depends on the pea, and on whether you clear the qualified-exemption revenue thresholds.
• Pesticide applicator certification — state department of agriculture under EPA delegation. Typically $75–$150, 2–8 weeks including the exam.
• Farm entity, EIN and state business licence — $50–$500, 1–3 weeks. Most commercial operations need a general state-level business licence.
• FSA farm number and annual acreage report — USDA Farm Service Agency, free, and the gateway to loans, insurance and programmes.
• Federal crop insurance — USDA Risk Management Agency. Dry peas are insurable in the main producing states; premiums are subsidised and vary by county and coverage level. The sales closing date precedes planting, so missing it costs you a year.

United Kingdom

Now the correction. A great many pea and arable guides tell UK readers they need a CPH (county parish holding) number. A CPH is a livestock traceability registration — it exists so animals can be traced during a disease outbreak. A pea-only arable holding registers on the Rural Payments service for land and scheme purposes, but does not need a CPH simply to grow peas. If you do need one, it arrives by email within 10 working days, and the RPA line is 03000 200 301 (GOV.UK). We flag this because a compliance section that repeats the error tells a UK lender the rest of the section was copied too.

• Rural Payments / RPA registration — free; the base registration for land and scheme access.
• Red Tractor Combinable Crops & Sugar Beet standards — Red Tractor Assurance. Peas are covered by this scheme, which runs across England and Wales with over 15,000 members (Red Tractor). Membership plus an annual audit, assessed before your first assured sale. Most merchants and processors will not accept a non-assured load, so treat this as a revenue prerequisite rather than a nice-to-have.
• PA1 plus PA2 or PA6 certificates of competence — City & Guilds NPTC. It is a legal requirement for anyone applying professional pesticides in the UK. PA1 runs roughly £115 + VAT training plus a £130 NPTC assessment fee; PA2 (tractor-mounted boom sprayer) around £420 inc VAT; a PA1+PA6 knapsack bundle around £535.50 inc VAT over two days' training and one day's assessment. Budget a resit — PA1 retakes run about £90 + VAT.
• PGRO membership — the Processors and Growers Research Organisation is the UK pulse sector's technical body and the source of the vining and combinable agronomy your plan should be citing.
• A vining contract — not a licence, but the binding constraint. There is no open market for vining peas. Without a contract agreed before drilling, and land inside a viner's catchment, the crop has nowhere to go.

Canada

Peas are a grain regulated under the Canada Grain Act. Elevators and grain dealers require a Canadian Grain Commission licence and must post security against their liabilities; the CGC publishes a list of licensed and bonded pulse brokers, buyers and processors (Canadian Grain Commission). Check any buyer against that list before you deliver a load — the licence is what stands between you and an unsecured claim if the buyer fails. In Saskatchewan, pulse marketing is governed by the Saskatchewan Pulse Crop Order (SOR/87-403), growers pay a levy to Saskatchewan Pulse Growers on sale, and a Declaration of Eligibility is signed on delivery. SPG itself does not buy or sell crop; it publishes the buyer listings.

Whichever jurisdiction you are in, a pea plan's compliance section should read like a checklist someone has actually walked through, with named agencies, real costs and real timelines. If you want that applied to your own county or parish, that is what the bespoke plan covers.

Five Ways Pea Plans Fail at the Bank

We have reviewed enough pulse and arable plans to see the same five failures repeat. None of them are agronomic.

1. Writing one plan for three businesses

Vining, combinable and fresh-market peas have different buyers, different capital requirements, different harvest logistics and different risk profiles. A plan that describes "the pea market" without choosing is telling the reader the founder has not chosen either. Pick one, name it in the executive summary, and let every subsequent number follow from it.

2. Putting a spot price on vining peas

There isn't one. Vining peas move on a contract agreed before the seed goes in, to a processor whose freezing window is measured in hours. Birds Eye's operation runs picked-to-frozen in 150 minutes and its supply comes from a roughly 35-mile radius around the Hull plant. A vining revenue forecast built on a market price is not optimistic; it is describing a market that does not exist.

3. Leaving the nitrogen out of the pea enterprise

The single most common and most expensive error. Peas fix up to 180 kg N/ha and hand it to the next crop. Account for that in the wheat enterprise and your peas look like a loss-making crop you keep growing for no reason. Account for it in the pea enterprise and the rotation makes obvious sense. Same farm, same cash, opposite lending decision.

4. Asking the wrong lender

"SBA 7(a) up to $5M" appears in nearly every pea guide online. SBA generally defers where USDA and Farm Credit lenders can serve the borrower, so a pure growing operation is normally an FSA case — microloans to $50,000, direct operating around 5.25% as of January 2026, plus larger direct and guaranteed facilities. Turning up at an SBA lender with a pea plan wastes a month and signals inexperience. SBA becomes right the moment you add processing, a value-added line or agritourism — so if that is the plan, lead with it.

5. Modelling cash as if peas pay on delivery

They don't. Settlement commonly runs 60–120 days behind delivery, so the working capital line has to carry the farm across harvest, into store, and out the far side of a payment cycle. Fresh-market growers get caught by the mirror image: cash comes in weekly, but picking labour goes out weekly too, and a 10-acre operation can be profitable on paper and insolvent in July.

Pea Trade Terms, Defined

Use these correctly in your plan. Buyers, agronomists and lenders all read the vocabulary as a competence signal.

• Vining pea — a pea harvested green and immature by a mobile viner and frozen within hours, grown exclusively on a processor contract.
• Combinable pea — a pea left to mature and dry in the field and harvested with a combine. Also called a field or dry pea. The UK term you should be using if you are not near a viner.
• Marrowfat — a large, starchy combinable pea class, the basis of mushy peas and much of the snack trade; typically a premium contract crop in the UK.
• Carlin pea — a traditional British brown pea revived commercially by Hodmedod's under the name "Black Badger". The textbook case of variety choice as a marketing decision.
• cwt (hundredweight) — 100 lb; the US pricing unit for dry peas. 20.6 million cwt was the 2025 US crop.
• Tenderometer — the instrument that measures pea maturity and dictates the vining harvest window. It, not your calendar, decides your harvest date.
• Rhizobium / inoculant — the nitrogen-fixing bacteria peas partner with, applied to seed. Essential on ground with no pea history.
• Identity preserved (IP) — crop segregated and traceable from a specified seed source to a specified buyer, as required by protein isolate contracts. Carries a premium and a compliance burden.
• Basis — the gap between the local cash price and the reference price. In a concentrated production area like North Dakota, basis is often the difference between a workable year and a bad one.

Sample Business Plan Preview

This is the structure and financial output a buyer receives, built on the same assumptions used throughout this page — the USDA yield, the $18.84/cwt price and the rotation credit.

What's in the Template

Every Avvale business plan template includes these sections, pre-structured for your industry:

• Executive Summary — Your business at a glance, written to hook investors in 60 seconds
• Company Overview — Legal structure, ownership, location, and founding story
• Industry Analysis — Market size, growth trends, and the regulatory position
• Customer Analysis — Target buyers, purchase triggers, and spending patterns
• Competitor Analysis — Local competitive mapping and your differentiation strategy
• Marketing Plan — Channels, messaging, and customer acquisition strategy
• Operations Plan — Day-to-day workflows, staffing structure, and key milestones
• Management Team — Founder bios, advisory board, and key hires planned

For a pea plan specifically, we'd add three things the generic structure misses: an enterprise-level rotation account so the nitrogen credit lands in the right column, a buyer schedule naming your elevator, viner or protein contract with freight distances, and a price-sensitivity table running the crop down to $16/cwt. Those are the three exhibits that decide an FSA conversation.

The optional Financial Forecast add-on (included in our $300/£250 and $1,000/£800 packages) provides a 5-year Excel model with income statement, cash flow, balance sheet, break-even analysis, and startup capital requirements.

Growing peas alongside other crops? Our wheat farm business plan template and bean farm business plan template cover the neighbouring rotations, and the free business plan template hub has the general-purpose structure. If you want the market section researched and written for you, that's the market research and content package.

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