Uganda's national maize yield is about 890 kg an acre on land that was actually harvested, and about 700 kg an acre across all the land that was planted. Both figures come from the same table of the same national agricultural survey, printed in two columns side by side. Which one applies to you depends on a question nobody usually asks.
The gap between them is the roughly 23 percent of planted maize area that produced no recorded harvest at all.
Maize Yield Per Acre in Uganda and the Denominator Nobody Checks
The most recent Annual Agricultural Survey puts national maize production at 3,510,479 tonnes, from 2,036,318 hectares planted and 1,562,067 hectares harvested. Divide the output by the harvested area and you get 2.25 tonnes a hectare, which the survey rounds to 2.2 and which converts to about 890 kg an acre. Divide the same output by the area planted and you get 1.72 tonnes a hectare, or about 700 kg an acre.
The survey defines the harvested area in a footnote, and the footnote is the whole story: it is the area planted, counted only on the observations whose production figure is available and greater than zero. An earlier round of the same survey spells out the consequence more plainly, noting that households which had not started harvesting at the time of the interview, or whose harvest was destroyed, are left out of the calculation.
So the 2.2 figure that circulates as Uganda's maize yield is the yield of a maize acre that worked. It is a perfectly sound number and it answers the question of how productive Ugandan maize land is when it produces. It is the wrong number for a grower deciding whether to plant, because that grower does not yet know which group their acre will land in.
Two honest limits on reading too much into the 23 percent. The survey's footnote lumps together crops that were destroyed and crops that simply had not been harvested yet when the enumerator called, and it does not split them. And the share moves a lot between rounds, from under 8 percent in an earlier survey to 23 percent in the latest one, which is a bigger swing than crop failure alone would comfortably explain. Part of the gap is real loss and part is fieldwork timing, and the reports do not tell you the mix.
Why the National Maize Yield Figure Has More Than One Value
Three national maize yield figures for Uganda are in circulation, at roughly 1.4 to 1.5, 2.2, and 3.4 tonnes a hectare. They do not come apart because anyone is careless about output. They come apart on the area.
Take the international series first. For the survey year above it publishes 1,719.1 kg a hectare for Uganda. That figure reproduces exactly from the national survey's own production of 3.5 million tonnes divided by its own area planted of 2,036,318 hectares. For the preceding year it publishes 1,462.6 kg a hectare, which reproduces exactly from that year's survey production of 2,759,579 tonnes over its planted area of 1,887,073 hectares. Two years, two exact reproductions. The international series is publishing the planted area basis while the national survey headlines the harvested area basis, from the same underlying data.
The third figure is harder. A Ugandan research report attributes a maize productivity of 3.4 tonnes a hectare to the national statistics office for a year in which that office's own survey gives 1.7, on an area more than twice the one the research report cites. The production estimates in the two documents are not far apart; the areas differ by a factor of about two. Both cannot be right about the area, and I cannot settle which is, so the page gives the span rather than picking.
That produces a rule worth carrying into any Ugandan maize figure you meet. When two maize yield figures disagree, check the area before you check the output. Ugandan production estimates across sources agree within roughly a sixth of each other. Ugandan maize area estimates differ by a factor of two. Almost every yield disagreement is an area disagreement wearing a yield costume.
| Basis of the figure | Per hectare | Per acre |
|---|---|---|
| National survey, per hectare harvested | 2.2 t | 890 kg |
| Same data, per hectare planted | 1.72 t | 700 kg |
| International series, four most recent years | 2.17 to 2.20 t | 880 to 890 kg |
| Same series, lowest of the last ten years | 1.39 t | 560 kg |
| Same series, highest of the last ten years | 2.50 t | 1,010 kg |
| A Ugandan research report's figure | 3.4 t | 1,380 kg |
The decade range in that table matters as much as the headline. The international series for Uganda runs from 1,388 to 2,500 kg a hectare across the last ten reported years, which is 560 to 1,010 kg an acre, with the four most recent years settling near 880. Any page that quotes one figure as Uganda's maize yield is quoting the year it happened to be written in.
Maize Yield Per Acre by Season, and Why the Second Season Is Riskier
Split the national survey by season and something counterintuitive appears. On the usual measure the second season looks clearly better. On the planted area measure it is slightly worse.
| Season | Per acre harvested | Per acre planted | Planted area with no harvest |
|---|---|---|---|
| First season | 790 kg | 715 kg | 9.7% |
| Second season | 1,100 kg | 680 kg | 38.4% |
| Whole year | 910 kg | 700 kg | 23.3% |
The second season's 1,100 kg an acre is about 39 percent above the first season's 790. Its yield per acre planted is fractionally lower. The entire apparent advantage is that a much larger share of second season area drops out of the denominator: 38.4 percent against 9.7 percent.
Read carefully, that is a risk statement rather than a productivity statement. Second season maize that makes it to harvest does well. A much larger fraction of it does not make it. The same caveat from the previous section applies, since incomplete harvesting at interview time inflates the second season exclusion to an unknown degree, but the direction survives either reading: the second season is where a Ugandan maize acre is most likely to produce nothing.
Worth setting beside that: the survey counted more crop plots under production in the second season than in the first, 21.8 million against 18.3 million, while the first season is the one treated as the main one, because its rains run longer. Ugandan growers plant more in the season that fails more often. Our page on maize planting seasons covers the rainfall pattern behind that, and the planting calendar sets the dates out by region.
Maize Yield Per Acre Across Uganda's Regions and Zones
Location moves the figure more than almost anything a grower controls. On the harvested area basis, sub regional yields in the national survey run from 1.4 tonnes a hectare in Teso and Karamoja, about 570 kg an acre, up to 3.6 in Tooro, about 1,460 kg an acre. On the planted area basis the spread is wider still, from 0.8 in Karamoja and 0.9 in Teso, roughly 320 to 360 kg an acre, to 2.6 in Ankole, about 1,050 kg an acre.
At the research zone level the same pattern holds, with the Fort Portal zone highest at 3.6 tonnes a hectare, the Kabale zone at 3.0, and the West Nile, Teso and Karamoja zones lowest at 1.4 to 1.5. A separate NARO survey that measured maize on 2,797 plots found the same geography independently, with zonal means running from about 1,710 kg a hectare in West Nile to about 2,610 in Bunyoro, or 690 to 1,060 kg an acre.
One statistical caution that every competitor page omits. The national survey publishes its own coefficients of variation, and they are 5.0 to 5.9 percent for the Uganda total, which is tight enough to rely on. Several sub regional figures are far looser, and second season production in Karamoja carries a coefficient of variation of 95.8 percent, which makes that particular cell unusable for anything. Treat the national figures as solid, treat your own sub region's figure as indicative, and do not build a plan on a single cell from a dry marginal zone.
How Far Apart Ugandan Maize Yields Actually Sit
An average is only useful if you know how wide the thing it averages is, and for Ugandan maize the answer is very wide. The NARO measured survey of 2,797 maize plots reported a mean farmer yield of 2,173.7 kg a hectare with a standard deviation of 1,563.0. The spread is about 72 percent of the mean.
The working conclusion from that spread is not comforting and it is useful. The national average is neither a target nor a forecast for your acre. It is the middle of a distribution wide enough that a grower at one standard deviation below the mean and a grower at one above are in altogether different businesses, on the same crop, in the same country.
What the 8 Tonne Maize Yield Potential Figure Actually Means
Every Ugandan maize document opens on the same gap. The ministry's own training manual states that average yields have remained as low as 2.2 to 2.5 tonnes a hectare against a potential of 8 tonnes a hectare, which is about 3,240 kg an acre. NARO puts its released varieties at 7 to 9 tonnes a hectare against older varieties yielding under 4, with two highland lines carrying a potential of 10 to 12, and notes that under good practices farmer yields of hybrid varieties can reach up to 9 tonnes a hectare. One hybrid is described in the ministry's manual as able to yield up to 3 tonnes an acre.
Those are all real figures and none of them is a planning figure. The proof is inside the ministry's own material: its four system budget pairs no purchased inputs with 700 kg an acre, low inputs with 1,000, and both of its high input systems with 2,500. The ministry's own working assumption for a fully fed maize acre is 2,500 kg, not the 3,240 its potential figure implies. The two numbers are about 30 percent apart in the same document, and the smaller one is the one it uses when it has to do arithmetic.
Improved Seed and the Measured Maize Yield Gap
The obvious explanation for the gap between 890 and 2,500 is that most growers do not use the package. That is true and the measured size of each part of it is smaller than you would guess.
The NARO survey compared growers using its released varieties against growers who were not, over the same 2,797 maize plots. Yield per hectare came out at 2,232.7 for the first group and 1,963.4 for the second. The report states that gap as 12 percent, computed as a share of the higher figure; measured against the lower figure, which is the conventional direction, it is about 14 percent. Either way it is a low double digit difference, not a multiple.
The same comparison carries a more interesting row. Those growers planted about 58 percent more maize land and harvested about 68 percent more grain, while their yield per hectare was only about 14 percent higher. Most of the extra grain came from more land, not from more grain per acre.
And it is an observational comparison, not a trial. Growers who buy improved seed also plant more, and the same report found credit access higher in its adoption areas than outside them. The 14 percent is what separates two groups of farmers who differ in several ways at once; it is not the measured effect of the seed on its own. Anyone promising that improved seed will double your yield is not working from this data or from any Ugandan data I could find.
What is measurable is why uptake is low, and it is mostly money. A Ugandan study of drought tolerant maize varieties estimated actual uptake at 14 percent against a potential of 22 percent if every grower knew about them, 30 percent if seed were physically available, and 47 percent if it were sold at a price growers could pay. Lack of awareness accounted for 8 percentage points of the shortfall, seed access for 16, and price for 33. The fertilizer side tells the same story: roughly nine Ugandan households in a hundred apply any mineral fertilizer, and 78.6 percent of those who do not gave cost as the reason. Our fertilizer application guide works that through, and the variety page covers which released lines suit which altitude.
Why a Reported Maize Yield Is Not a Measured Maize Yield
This is the part that should change how you read any yield figure, including the ones on this page.
A two round household panel in eastern Uganda measured plot level maize production four different ways: what the farmer reported, crop cutting on a sub plot, crop cutting on the full plot, and remote sensing. Farmer reported production came out above the crop cut figures, and the overstatement was concentrated in the lower half of the plot size distribution. Smaller plots were overstated more.
That has two consequences. The first is practical: a yield per acre figure you are told, whether by a neighbour, a seed promoter or your own memory of last season, is probably high, and more so on a small plot. The second is that the well known result that small farms out produce large ones per acre held only on the farmer reported data. On all three measured alternatives the relationship flattened out to constant returns to scale. The comforting idea that a small Ugandan maize plot is intensively farmed and so more productive per acre does not survive being measured.
It also explains the odd top of the distribution in the NARO survey, where the highest plot came out at about 5,760 kg an acre, above every published Ugandan research ceiling. A household survey collects a reported quantity over a reported or mapped area, so its upper tail carries measurement error alongside good farming. Treat the mean of such a survey as informative and its extremes as suspect.
How to Measure Your Own Maize Yield Per Acre
Given all of the above, the only maize yield figure that is genuinely useful to you is your own, and getting one is a weighing exercise rather than a calculation.
Plant population is the lever most often set wrong before any of this is measurable. The ministry gives 10 kg of seed an acre and an optimum population of 21,000 plants, at either 75 by 25 cm with one seed a hole or 75 by 60 cm with two seeds a hole. Work the arithmetic on an acre of 4,047 square metres and only the first setting reaches that figure: 75 by 25 cm gives about 21,600 sites, while 75 by 60 cm with two seeds gives about 18,000. The manual prints the same population beside both spacings, and only one of them reconciles. A grower using the wider setting and expecting the stated population is planning on about 17 percent more plants than they have.
Over seeding is the commoner error in the other direction. The national survey found the median seed rate actually applied running from 9.1 to 22.0 kg an acre by sub region, above the recommendation in more than half of sub regions. Seed is not the binding constraint on most Ugandan maize acres, and doubling it does not buy yield when the nutrients and the rain are what is short. The seed rate page and the plant population calculator cover the arithmetic, and the crop production record template is where the seasonal figures go.
Frequently Asked Questions About Maize Yield Per Acre in Uganda
How many bags of maize should I get from an acre? The question cannot be answered cleanly, because a bag is not a fixed weight here. The grain standard caps a package at 50 kg, and measured trader bags have averaged about 122 kg. At the national average of 890 kg an acre that is about 18 standard packages or about 7 overfilled trader bags, which is exactly why an unweighed sale is a price you did not set.
Is 2.2 tonnes a hectare a good maize yield or a bad one? It is the national average on land that produced a harvest, which makes it the middle of a very wide distribution rather than a standard. On the same data, counting every acre planted, the figure is about 1.7 tonnes a hectare. If your own acre is at 890 kg you are average among acres that worked, and if it is at 700 you are average among acres that were planted.
What is the highest maize yield anyone gets in Uganda? NARO puts its released hybrids at 7 to 9 tonnes a hectare under good practice, about 2,830 to 3,640 kg an acre, with two highland lines rated at 10 to 12 tonnes a hectare. The ministry's stated potential is 8 tonnes a hectare. None of those is a field expectation, and the highest figure any Ugandan institution actually budgets with is 2,500 kg an acre.
Will improved seed double my maize yield? No Ugandan data supports that. The best measured Ugandan comparison, across 2,797 plots, puts the yield difference between growers using released varieties and growers who are not at roughly 12 to 14 percent depending on which way you compute it, and even that is an association between two groups of farmers who differ in several ways rather than a measured effect of the seed alone.
Why is my maize yield below the national average? Four candidates, in the order the data ranks them. Location, which moves the figure by a factor of two or more between sub regions. Season, since a second season acre is four times more likely to produce nothing. Nutrients, since roughly nine households in a hundred apply any mineral fertilizer. And the arithmetic of the average itself, which excludes about 23 percent of planted area, so the figure you are comparing against was calculated only on acres that worked.
What does an acre of maize earn at these yields? That depends on the grain price you sell at and what the acre cost you, and both move a great deal. The maize profit page works the margin through at several yield and price combinations, the cost page carries the budget, and the current maize price page has the figure to plug in.
Does a small plot really yield more per acre than a big one? Not once it is measured. That result appeared in eastern Uganda when production was taken from what farmers reported, and it disappeared under sub plot crop cutting, full plot crop cutting and remote sensing, all three of which pointed to constant returns to scale. The reported figures were overstated most on the smallest plots.
How do I work out my own yield per acre? Weigh the harvest rather than counting bags, dry to 13 percent moisture before weighing so seasons are comparable, measure the plot rather than estimating it, divide by the area you planted rather than the area that produced, and keep the record in the same units every season. Anything else gives you a number you cannot compare with your own last season, let alone with anyone else's.
Checking Grain Prices and Seed Supply Against Your Own Yield
A yield figure only earns its keep once it is set against a price and a cost, and both of those move faster than any yield does. Once you have a weighed figure for your own acre, take it to the current maize prices to see what it is worth at today's farm gate, and to the seed supplier pages and fertilizer suppliers to price the inputs that would move it. The farm profit calculator is where the three numbers meet, and the wider crop growing guides cover the rest of the maize package that any yield figure depends on.