I used to work on a farm producing hybrid seed. It is indeed very, very expensive compared to non-hybrid seed — in large part because it is a LOT of work to produce, depending on the crop.
You have to maintain a separate "father" line and "mother" line. You must prevent the mother line from self-pollinating, which in some cases (like tomatoes) requires you to physically remove the anthers from every single flower, ever single day.
You must also prevent it from cross-pollinating with the wrong crop, which (for insect-pollinated crops) means you may need to grow it under insect-proof netting and then provide your own pollinators. That's easy enough if it's a honeybee-pollinated crop, but some crops are only pollinated by wild insects, so you need to hand-pollinate every flower.
In most cases, the father line needs to be grown intermixed with the mother line to ensure good pollination. These are usually two wildly different varieties (otherwise, why are you hybridizing them?) with different physical features, care requirements, planting times, etc. This means you typically can't use standard farming equipment (which is designed for monocropping at scale) and must plant and care for the crops using a lot more physical labor.
Once the mother line is pollinated, the father line must removed to ensure it doesn't produce seed that could get mixed up with the hybrid seed. While removing it, you have to be very careful to not the damage the mother line crop. In some crops, you must not even jostle the mother plants too much or they'll drop a lot of their seed.
For this reason, F1 hybrid seed is very expensive, especially for crops where hybridizing is particularly painstaking. For example, the tomato seed I hybridized sold for approximately $1 per seed. It was extremely worth it to or customers, though, because it meant they could grow several times the amount of fruit in the same space with the same inputs.
You have to maintain a separate "father" line and "mother" line. You must prevent the mother line from self-pollinating, which in some cases (like tomatoes) requires you to physically remove the anthers from every single flower, ever single day.
You must also prevent it from cross-pollinating with the wrong crop, which (for insect-pollinated crops) means you may need to grow it under insect-proof netting and then provide your own pollinators. That's easy enough if it's a honeybee-pollinated crop, but some crops are only pollinated by wild insects, so you need to hand-pollinate every flower.
In most cases, the father line needs to be grown intermixed with the mother line to ensure good pollination. These are usually two wildly different varieties (otherwise, why are you hybridizing them?) with different physical features, care requirements, planting times, etc. This means you typically can't use standard farming equipment (which is designed for monocropping at scale) and must plant and care for the crops using a lot more physical labor.
Once the mother line is pollinated, the father line must removed to ensure it doesn't produce seed that could get mixed up with the hybrid seed. While removing it, you have to be very careful to not the damage the mother line crop. In some crops, you must not even jostle the mother plants too much or they'll drop a lot of their seed.
For this reason, F1 hybrid seed is very expensive, especially for crops where hybridizing is particularly painstaking. For example, the tomato seed I hybridized sold for approximately $1 per seed. It was extremely worth it to or customers, though, because it meant they could grow several times the amount of fruit in the same space with the same inputs.