Well, if you read the grass label, it says how many other seeds are in the mix- less than 2% usually, hopefully less than 1%. Imagine trying to grow 50 acrea of grass with fewer than 2% weeds. That's not easy. Then you need to irrigate that grass, treat for any diseases or pests that show up and harvest the seeds. Then you have to package them, have the seed examined to be sure there are no noxious weeds and to measure how many other seeds are in there and transport them to a distributor. Plus pay employees and the government. And change the oil on the equipment and buy gas for the tractors. Hopefully ther's enough left over to pay the mortgage, the loans for the equipment and put some bread on your table.

With many farm products, most of the profit goes to the middle layer, not the farmer. And the above is why more farming is done by large corporations these days. Monsanto is one. They also spend a bit on research and development.

Does that help?

How many individual seeds are in that "big bag"? Take that same amount of seeds and translate it to corn....
I'll bet you will see that grass seed is cheap.
Places here that have bins of individual grass seeds, have different prices that are somewhat based on the size of the seed.....and hence the number of seeds per pound.
Ever buy petunia seeds? Or poppys?
Grass seed is cheap!!!
Linda C

Seed costs vary according to the type of grass (you should price some Centipede seed!!!), the success or failure of the growing season (drought, hurricanes), fuel, etc. I've attached an interesting link that explains about the harvesting techniques of many different kinds of grass seeds, but not bermuda. You can look that up, there is quite a bit of information on the web.

Here is a link that might be useful: seed harvesting

There's a huge variance in the price of bermuda grass seed, but at $20/lb, you get about 2,300,000 seeds. Said another way, one penny buys you 1,150 grass seeds. Even I can't remember when anything was that cheap - and I'm almost as old as Linda and Dorie.

Al

Ok - that's what I figured once I thought about it - there are tons of seeds in a bag.
Now to understand HOW they harvest seeds (I don't know if I've ever seen a grass seed)... I will refer to rhizo's link!

Thanks all!