Bean Yield Per Acre

A realistic bean yield per acre for Uganda is about 300 to 350 kg of dry grain from one season, which is the band where every official Ugandan and FAO figure overlaps. Released varieties are rated far higher, at roughly 600 to 1,500 kg per acre depending on type, and that gap between measured and rated is the whole subject of this page. Four government and research sources give four different national figures.

None of them is wrong. They measure different things, two of them sit on opposite sides of a break in the data, and one widely repeated Ugandan bean yield claim turns out to be a research figure with its units swapped.

Four Ugandan Bean Yield Figures for One Number

Here are the four, converted to the same unit so they can be compared. An acre is 0.4047 of a hectare, so a figure in kilogrammes per hectare becomes a per acre figure by multiplying by 0.4047, and a per acre figure becomes per hectare by dividing.

Source	As published	Per acre
National seed policy	300 to 500 kg/acre	300 to 500 kg
FAO data, recent years	800 to 854 kg/ha	324 to 346 kg
National statistics	0.65 to 0.8 t/ha	263 to 324 kg
NARO bean manual	Under 500 kg/ha	Under 202 kg

What each of the four is actually measuring, which is what explains the spread.

Uganda's national seed policy states that yields of beans range between 300 and 500 kg per acre per season, against a potential of up to 900 kg per acre per season. It is a policy document arguing that poor seed access holds yields down, so its current figure is a farm level estimate and its potential figure is a target.

FAO's production data for Uganda reports dry bean yield between 800 and 854 kg per hectare across the six most recent years in the series, which is 324 to 346 kg per acre. It is derived by dividing reported national production by a reported area, and which area is the live question. Uganda's own survey publishes two, area planted and area harvested, where the harvested figure counts only plots that returned a recorded crop. For beans those two bases give 327 and 239 kg per acre from the same survey, so about 27 percent of planted area produced nothing recorded. Checking which basis a figure uses settles more disagreements between published Ugandan yields than any other single question.

Uganda's own agricultural statistics, from the national annual agricultural survey, give 0.65 to 0.8 tonnes per hectare across recent reported years, which is 263 to 324 kg per acre. This is household survey work and it is the lowest of the survey based figures.

NARO's bean training manual states that Ugandan bean yields are estimated at less than 500 kg per hectare, against a sub Saharan African average of more than 770. That is under 202 kg per acre, the lowest figure of the four, and it comes from a manual written for northern Uganda, where the institute notes low production from dependence on rainfall, low yielding varieties and poor seed access.

Read together, the four agree on more than they appear to. Three of them overlap between 300 and 346 kg per acre, which is why that is the band to plan on. The lowest figure is a regional one, and the highest is the top of a policy estimate rather than a measurement.

The narrower 263 to 324 kg per acre figure used elsewhere on this site, in our costing of what a bean acre costs to grow, sits inside the band on this page. That is deliberate: it comes from Uganda's own survey alone, and this page widens it by adding FAO's series to the comparison.

The Bean Yield Figure in FAO's Own Data That Does Not Fit

FAO's Uganda dry bean series contains a step that anybody quoting a bean yield should know about, because it decides which era your figure came from.

An audit of FAO's reported Uganda dry bean series, done by reading the area, yield and production columns together rather than the yield column alone.

The yield series halves between two consecutive reported years. It runs at 1,300 to 1,730 kg per hectare through the earlier part of the series, then drops to about 800 and stays there. Read alone, that looks like Ugandan bean farming collapsing.

The harvested area nearly doubles across the same break. It sits between about 483,000 and 675,000 hectares in the earlier years, then rises to between 897,000 and 1,034,000 in the later ones.

Total production barely moves. It runs between roughly 810,000 and 1,080,000 tonnes in the earlier years and between 766,000 and 827,000 in the later ones. A modest fall, nothing like a halving.

So the yield collapse is arithmetic, not agronomy. Output stayed broadly flat while the reported area it was divided by nearly doubled, and the quotient halved. That is the signature of a change in how the cropped area was measured, not of a change in how beans grow. The later figures also agree closely with Uganda's own household survey, which is what you would expect if the area series was revised towards the national survey.

One year fits neither era. The transitional year reports the old area with the new yield, so its production comes out at about 437,000 tonnes, roughly half of every year around it. Treat that single year as unusable in either direction.

The practical consequence is short. A Ugandan bean yield of about 1.5 to 1.7 tonnes per hectare is a real FAO figure and it belongs to the pre revision area series. Quoting it today, next to a current area figure, doubles the answer. If you see 1.7 t/ha attributed to Uganda, you are looking at the highest year of the older era.

Released Bean Variety Yield Potential, Converted to Per Acre

NARO publishes a yield potential for each variety it has released, always in kilogrammes per hectare. Converted to per acre, the released range looks like this.

Among bush types, NABE 20 is recorded at 1,600 to 2,200 kg per hectare, or 647 to 890 kg per acre. NABE 17, NABE 18, NABE 19 and NABE 23 are each recorded at 2,000 to 2,500 kg per hectare, which is 809 to 1,012 kg per acre. The biofortified NAROBEAN 1 is rated 1,500 to 2,000 kg per hectare, or 607 to 809 per acre.

Climbers go higher, which is the whole argument for staking them. NABE 12C is rated 2,000 to 3,500 kg per hectare, NABE 29C at 2,200 to 3,500, NABE 26C at 2,500 to 3,500, and the biofortified climber NAROBEAN 4C at 2,500 to 3,700. That top figure is 1,497 kg per acre, roughly four and a half times the measured national average.

Notice how well that lines up with the seed policy. Its stated potential of up to 900 kg per acre per season is 2,224 kg per hectare, which sits right inside the released bush bean range. Two Ugandan government documents, written for different purposes in different units, agree on the ceiling. That agreement is a useful check that the potential figure is real rather than aspirational.

What a potential figure is not is a forecast for your field. It is the output of a variety trial: known seed, known spacing, a supervised plot, a recorded harvest. Which variety suits your altitude and season is covered in our guide to growing Nambale type beans and in the wider crop growing guides.

How the Commonest Inflated Bean Yield Claim Is Made

A figure of 1,800 to 2,500 kg of beans per acre circulates in Ugandan farming coverage. It is worth working out where it came from, because that is more useful than simply rejecting it.

Convert it: 1,800 to 2,500 kg per acre is 4.4 to 6.2 tonnes per hectare. That is above the highest potential NARO records for any released Ugandan bean, including the climbers at 3.7 t/ha, and five to eight times the measured national average. No Ugandan document supports it and no variety could deliver it.

Now look at NARO's own published bush bean potential: 2,000 to 2,500 kg per hectare. The circulating claim is that range, with hectares relabelled as acres. The unit swap multiplies by about 2.47, and a research figure becomes an impossible farm figure without anybody inventing a number.

The same test disposes of a second common claim, 10 to 15 bags of 90 kg per acre, which is 900 to 1,350 kg per acre. Its floor is inside the released bush bean potential and its ceiling is above it, so that claim is a variety potential presented as an expectation rather than a unit error.

Three checks that catch nearly every inflated bean yield claim, in the order that costs least effort.

Convert to the other unit and see if it becomes a familiar number. Multiply a per acre figure by 2.47 to get per hectare, or by 0.4047 to go the other way. If the converted figure lands exactly on a published variety potential, you have found a unit swap rather than a finding.

Compare against the highest released potential, not against the average. No Ugandan bean variety is rated above 3,700 kg per hectare, or about 1,500 kg per acre. Any claim above that ceiling is wrong regardless of what conditions are assumed, because the genetics are not there.

Check whether the source's own numbers multiply out. A Ugandan bean dissertation circulates with a cost of about 525,000, revenue of about 616,500 and a profit of about 915,000 shillings per acre. Those three figures cannot all be true at once, and a source that fails its own arithmetic is not a source for any of its figures.

Ask what management level produced it. A trial plot figure, a demonstration plot figure and a farm figure are three different quantities. Uganda's own documents put the first at two to three times the third, so a page quoting a trial figure as what to expect has left out the largest variable on the page.

What the Yield Gap in Ugandan Bean Farming Is Actually Made Of

If the measured average is about 300 to 350 kg per acre and released varieties are rated at 600 to 1,000 for bush types, something between three and four hundred kilogrammes per acre is going missing. The usual answer is fertilizer. The evidence says fertilizer is a small part of it.

On farm nutrient addition trials run across Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria and Ghana included Ugandan climbing bean plots, and the interesting figure is the control treatment. With no inputs at all, the climbing bean control plots yielded 1,657 kg per hectare. Adding phosphorus lifted that to 1,905, and adding potassium and micronutrients on top took it to 2,076, with the largest standard error on those means at 315 kg per hectare.

Sizing the parts of Uganda's bean yield gap against the measured national average of roughly 800 kg per hectare.

Unfertilized trial plot against national average: about 857 kg per hectare. The control plots, with nothing applied, more than doubled the national figure. Whatever produced that is not fertilizer, because no fertilizer was used.

Full nutrient package against unfertilized trial plot: about 419 kg per hectare. That is what every nutrient in the trial was worth on top of good management, and more than half of it sits inside the standard error.

So management, plot selection, supervision and measurement account for roughly twice what nutrients did. Known seed at a known spacing, timely planting, weeding on schedule, a harvest that is weighed rather than estimated.

The caveat, stated rather than buried. Trial plots are chosen and supervised, and the Ugandan crop in that dataset was climbing bean, which outyields bush bean. So the comparison shows a direction, not a clean margin. Even against the highest bush bean rating, though, an unfertilized trial plot at 1,657 kg per hectare is a long way above the national figure.

Seed supply is the other documented piece, and Uganda's national seed policy quantifies it. Certified seed contributes only about 15 percent of the national seed requirement, about 85 percent of seed planted comes from informal sources, and an estimated 30 to 40 percent of seed traded in the market is counterfeit. The policy names limited use of improved seed as the reason current farm level yields sit far below potential.

Disease is the third. Field yield losses from southern blight, Uganda's most widespread bean root rot, have been reported at 55 to 65 percent, and from Fusarium root rot at up to 86 percent in severely affected soils, with no Ugandan variety currently resisting either. Our page on bean diseases and their control covers why a tolerance claim on a seed packet may not address the pathogen you have.

Bush Against Climbing Bean Yield Per Acre

The single largest yield decision available to a Ugandan bean grower is habit, and it is a bigger lever than any input on this page.

On NARO's own ratings, the best bush types reach 2,500 kg per hectare and the best climbers 3,700, which is 1,012 against 1,497 kg per acre. Climbers also need about half the seed weight per acre, because they are planted at wider within row spacing, and NARO's earlier climbing bean material describes them as high yielders compared with bush beans under good management on the same area.

The cost of that extra yield is stakes, and stakes are the constraint rather than the agronomy. NARO's climbing bean material asks for stakes about 2 m long, one between every two plants or in the centre of every four, and Ugandan highland farmers given a demonstration at 40,000 stakes per hectare averaged 27,000 to 34,000 in the following season, with stakes shorter than demonstrated. Climbers also want higher altitude: they are traditionally grown in the south western and eastern highlands, though they have been moving into lower areas. How the two habits change the seed bill and plant population is worked through on bean spacing and seed rate per acre.

What Intercropping Does to Bean Yield Per Acre

Most Ugandan beans share their field, so a pure stand yield figure is the wrong benchmark for many readers, and the Ugandan measurement of the difference is large.

In work at Kabale, climbing beans mixed with maize yielded 63 percent less in one season and 71 percent less in another than the same beans in sole stand, and the loss tracked a fall in pods per plant of 39 and 33 percent. Maize itself gave 32 percent less in the mixture in one of those seasons. The best bean yield recorded in that trial, about 1,075 kg per hectare, came from a mixture holding roughly 24,600 maize and 66,700 bean plants per hectare.

Against that, the mixture returned a 26 percent yield advantage over the mean sole crop yield of both species, with total income 32 percent above sole maize and 14 percent above sole beans in one season. So a bean yield per acre from an intercropped field is not comparable with a pure stand figure, and the honest way to read a mixture is by what the acre returned rather than by what the beans did.

If you are planning on a bean yield figure and your field will carry maize too, take roughly a third of the pure stand figure for the beans and count the maize separately.

The Bean Yield You Harvest and the Yield You Sell

One more subtraction stands between a field yield and an income, and in Uganda it is a large one. The Bean Cultivation Handbook estimates that farmers in Uganda lose up to 40 percent of their produce between harvesting and marketing, through poor post harvest handling that also costs them grain quality.

The stages where it goes are all after the yield you would measure in the field: transport, drying, threshing, cleaning, packaging and storage. Grain comes off the plant at 18 to 24 percent moisture and has to come down to 14 percent for safe handling, or 13 percent for seed, and mechanical drying must stay under 40 degrees for beans. Threshing on a rack rather than on bare ground protects the grain from damage and dirt. Hermetic storage holds beans safely for more than a year and kills storage insects by suffocation without chemicals.

Which means a bean yield per acre is really two numbers: what the field produced and what left the store in sellable condition. A grower who harvests 330 kg and loses a third of it has sold a 220 kg acre. Storage method is covered in our bean storage guide, and what beans are fetching is tracked on our bean price page.

Converting Bean Yield Between Hectares and Acres Without Lying

Almost every research figure for beans is per hectare and almost every Ugandan farmer thinks in acres, so this conversion sits under every number on this page. One hectare is 2.471 acres; one acre is 0.4047 hectares.

Two rules keep the conversion honest. Convert once, at the point of use, and state which unit the original was in, because a figure converted twice by different people drifts. And never round a converted range inward: 2,000 to 2,500 kg per hectare is 809 to 1,012 kg per acre, so writing it as 800 to 1,000 is fine, while writing it as 1,000 quietly turns a range into a promise. Our acre to hectare converter handles the arithmetic if you would rather not.

Bag counts are the third trap. Ugandan bean grain moves in bags of no fixed weight, so a yield in bags cannot be compared with a yield in kilogrammes unless the bag weight is stated. Any figure given in bags without a weight is not a yield figure at all.

Planning a Bean Crop on a Yield You Can Defend

For a budget, plan on 300 to 350 kg of dry bean per acre from a season under ordinary smallholder management with saved or locally bought seed, and treat anything above 600 as requiring certified seed of a rated variety, good spacing, timely weeding and a season that cooperates. For climbers with stakes actually in place, the rated ceiling reaches about 1,500 kg per acre, and nobody should budget on a ceiling.

Then subtract post harvest loss before you turn the yield into money, because that subtraction is up to 40 percent and it lands after every other decision has been made. What the acre costs to reach that yield is set out in our costing of bean farming per acre, and it is worth comparing against maize yield per acre in Uganda if you are choosing between the two. Before committing, check what beans are currently fetching and what certified seed of a rated variety costs near you, because the yield figure only earns its keep once both of those are known.

Questions Farmers Ask About Bean Yield Per Acre

How many kilogrammes of beans should I expect from one acre? About 300 to 350 kg of dry grain from one season under ordinary smallholder management. That is the band where Uganda's national seed policy, FAO's recent data and Uganda's own agricultural survey overlap. NARO's northern Uganda manual puts it lower, under 202 kg per acre, and the seed policy's upper figure reaches 500.

Why do published Ugandan bean yields differ so much? Because they measure different things. A policy document gives a farm level estimate and a target; a survey divides reported production by reported area; a training manual describes one region. FAO's series also contains a break where the reported area nearly doubled while production stayed flat, which halved the yield figure without anything happening in any field.

Can I really get 2,000 kg of beans per acre? No. That is above the highest rating NARO gives any released Ugandan bean once converted, and figures in that range are usually NARO's own per hectare variety potential with the unit relabelled as acres. The unit swap multiplies by about 2.47. The genuine ceiling for a rated climber is about 1,500 kg per acre and for a bush type about 1,000.

Will fertilizer close the gap between my yield and the variety potential? Only part of it. Unfertilized control plots in on farm trials yielded more than double the national average, and the entire nutrient package added less than half of what the control plot already had over the average. Seed class, spacing, planting date, weeding and a weighed harvest do more work than the bag does.

Do climbing beans yield more per acre than bush beans? On NARO's ratings, yes: about 1,500 against about 1,000 kg per acre at the top end, from about half the seed weight. The cost is stakes, and Ugandan highland farmers given a staking demonstration used fewer and shorter stakes than recommended in the following season, so the yield advantage depends on a material that is often scarce.

How much less do I get if I intercrop beans with maize? In Ugandan work at Kabale, roughly a third of the sole crop bean yield, with losses of 63 and 71 percent across two seasons. The acre still did better overall, returning a 26 percent yield advantage over the mean sole crop yield of both species, so the mixture is not a mistake; it just makes a pure stand bean figure the wrong benchmark.

What is a good bean yield per acre worth in Uganda? That depends on the grain price at the time you sell and on whether you sorted and graded, and bean prices move month to month. What is more stable and more useful is the quantity side: work from 300 to 350 kg per acre, subtract post harvest loss of up to 40 percent, and only then apply whatever price you can actually get. Check the current bean price before doing the multiplication rather than working from a remembered figure.

Why does my harvest weigh less than what I saw in the field? Because up to 40 percent of Ugandan bean produce is lost between harvest and marketing. Grain comes off at 18 to 24 percent moisture and has to reach 14 percent for safe handling, drying on bare ground picks up dirt and damage, threshing on the ground breaks grain, and storage insects take more. A yield measured before drying is not a yield you can sell.

How do I convert a bean yield from hectares to acres? Multiply the per hectare figure by 0.4047, or divide by 2.471. So 2,000 kg per hectare is about 809 kg per acre. Convert once, say which unit the original used, and do not round a range inward, because a range rounded to a single number becomes a promise the figure cannot keep.

The most useful thing about a bean yield figure is knowing which kind it is. Survey figures describe what Ugandan farms produce, variety ratings describe what a trial produced, and the numbers that circulate above both are usually one of those two with the units changed. Plan on the survey band, treat the rating as a ceiling, and check current bean prices and certified seed availability near you before turning either into a budget.