Rice Mill Profit Calculator

Driage: 20% paddy costs 8.75% more, not 7%

Paddy is bought at the moisture on the meter and milled at the moisture your mill hulls at. Drying removes only water; the dry matter stays. So the weight that survives is quintals bought × (100 − purchase moisture) ÷ (100 − hulling moisture). IRRI’s Rice Knowledge Bank gives the standard example: 1,000 kg harvested at 25% moisture and dried to 14% weighs 872 kg. The calculator reproduces that figure.

In the example batch, 86.77 qtl at 20% dried to 13% leaves 79.79 qtl. The 6.98 qtl that dried off is 8.05% of the weight bought, and at the purchase rate it was ₹14,172 paid for water. The money does not change, but it now buys fewer dry quintals, so the rate rises from ₹2,030 to ₹2,207.63, up 8.75%. The rate always rises by a little more than the weight falls, because the same money is spread over less paddy.

The common shortcut subtracts the moisture points: 20 − 13 = 7%. It is wrong because the moisture percentage is of the wet weight, which is itself shrinking. On this batch the shortcut counts 0.91 qtl of dry paddy that does not exist and prices the dry paddy ₹24.83 a quintal too cheap.

Moisture ready-reckoner at ₹2,030 a quintal

What 100 quintals bought at each moisture turn into at 13% hulling moisture. Change the purchase rate or the hulling moisture in the calculator to work out your own batch.

Compare lots on the rate of dry paddy, not the rate quoted. A lot at 24% moisture offered at ₹2,030 really costs ₹2,323.82 a dry quintal, while a lot at 17% offered at ₹2,100 costs ₹2,201.20: the dearer quote is the cheaper paddy.

Recovery: what the dry paddy turns into

Each output is sold separately at its own rate, so recovery is worth measuring output by output.

In the example batch, of 79.79 qtl of dry paddy:

Whole rice is 40.01% of the dry paddy and the brokens and rejection another 26.51%, a rice out-turn of 66.51%. The Government of India’s uniform out-turn ratio for custom-milled rice is 67% for raw rice and 68% for parboiled rice, measured on paddy as procured. On the paddy as bought, before drying, this batch’s out-turn is 61.16%. Compare like with like: the dry-basis figure always reads higher.

The outputs here add up to 79.01 qtl, so 0.78 qtl, or 0.98% of the dry paddy, is in no output: dust and chaff lost in milling. If that share is large, or negative, the weights entered do not match the batch, and the calculator says so.

Cost per kg of rice: ₹30.16, after crediting everything else

Dividing the whole cost by the rice alone overstates what rice costs, because the brokens, rejection, polish and bhussi pay for part of the batch. The fair method credits them first. The batch cost ₹1,91,176; everything except whole rice sold for ₹94,900; the ₹96,276 left over is what the rice has to recover. Over 3,192 kg of rice that is ₹30.16 a kg, against a selling rate of ₹33.00 a kg.

The most you can pay for paddy, and the least you can sell rice for

With this moisture, this recovery and these rates, the batch breaks even at a paddy rate of ₹2,134.41 a quintal. It was bought at ₹2,030, which is ₹104.41 of headroom. Wetter paddy lowers that ceiling, because less of each quintal survives to be milled.

Holding every other rate, rice has to sell for at least ₹3,016.17 a quintal. At ₹3,300 the batch has ₹283.83 a quintal of room before it makes a loss.

Best and worst case

The same batch under different markets. The best case buys paddy ₹50 cheaper and 2 points drier and sells rice ₹150 dearer; the worst case pays ₹50 more for paddy 3 points wetter and sells rice ₹150 cheaper. Recovery percentages and milling cost per quintal stay the same.

Three modest moves on the same lot swing the result by ₹30,708, from a profit to a loss. Moisture does most of the damage quietly: it raises the rate of dry paddy and shrinks every output at once.

A day, a month, a year

At 4 trucks a day of 25 quintals, the mill takes in 100 qtl of paddy and turns out 36.79 qtl of rice a day. If every batch matched this one, that is ₹10,441 a day, ₹2,71,476 over 26 working days and ₹32,57,715 a year on 31,200 qtlof paddy. Batches do not all match, so treat this as the season’s scale, and check it against your books.

Sources and methodology

Driage uses the dry-matter mass balance in IRRI Rice Knowledge Bank’s Moisture content calculations (knowledgebank.irri.org), whose 1,000 kg example the calculator reproduces. The out-turn norms are the Government of India’s.

• PIB: the 67% out-turn ratio set by FCI, uniform across India (27 October 2024)
• Lok Sabha: the uniform out-turn ratio of 67% for raw rice and 68% for parboiled rice
• How we calculate — methodology

Method. Recovery is measured on the dry paddy at your hulling moisture; the out-turn is also shown on the paddy as bought. Agent commission and truck hire are charged only on agent paddy. Cost per kg of rice credits every other output at its rate before dividing by the rice. The best and worst case keep the batch’s recovery percentages and milling cost per quintal. The engine is verified on every change against 56 assertions, including IRRI’s drying example, every figure of one real batch worked by hand, and hundreds of random batches recomputed by separate arithmetic. The count and the per-case breakdown are published on the formula verification page.

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