Most of the money lost on a Ugandan smallholding is lost to arithmetic rather than agronomy. The calculation is usually simple; what goes wrong is the figure it is run on. A rate published per hectare applied to an acre delivers two and a half times too much. A feed table printed per hundred birds applied to a flock of five hundred understates the feed bill fivefold. A price agreed per bag, when the bag holds 122 kg rather than 100, moves the price per kilogramme by a fifth before any bargaining starts.
Each calculator below sets out one of these, with the formula, a worked example in the units Ugandan farms actually use, and links to the crop or livestock guides the inputs come from. Two run through everything else: fix your area and your plant population first, because seed rate, fertiliser rate and yield per acre are all derived from them.
Before you calculate anything, write it down
Every figure on this page assumes you know what you spent, what you harvested and how much ground it came off. Reconstructed at the end of a season, those numbers are guesswork and almost always flatter the result. Written down on the day, they take seconds. The smallest set of records worth keeping, and formats that survive a harvest week, are in the farm record keeping guide.
Prices and costs
These calculators need a price and a cost of production to work against. Cost build-ups by enterprise are under farming costs, and how to establish what your produce is worth today, rather than working from a figure published months ago, is in farm prices in Uganda.