Maize Yields
Today we sold our maize from our first season on our farm, so I wanted to take an opportunity to report our yields for our first season on the farm.
We planted 1/3 rd of an acre of maize and 1/6 th of an acre of beans during our first season on land that was extremely abused by years of poor farming practices. In fact, when we prepared our fields many of the people laughed at us when we told them we were planting maize on that land. They said, “maize doesn’t grow on this land”. We planted anyway because we believe that by following the good biblical, management, and technological practices that comprise Farming God’s Way, God has the power to restore forsaken land.
We spoke to the district development officer before the season to learn the record yields for Mayuge District, the district our farm is located. He told us 6 bags of maize per acre is the record yield for the district, but there was some confusion on whether they were 50kg bags or 100kg bags. This means that the record yield for the district was between 300-600kg per acre.
An average family of six needs approximately 1,250kg of maize to survive, so they would need 2-4 acres of maize to survive with this kind of yield! Most family farms in Uganda are not that big, which means that farmers are not able to even grow the maize they need for their families.
In our first season, with poor soil, on land that we were told couldn’t grow maize, we were able to grow an average of 1,862kg of maize on our large scale gardens. This is between 3-6 times the RECORD yield for Mayuge District! We could have easily beat this, but we struggled with maize borer beetles that were brought into our farm in some maize stalks we gathered from a neighbor’s farm for mulch. The beetles caused quite a bit of damage in the areas we used that neighbor’s stalks.
This means that if a farmer had a half an acre of maize, they could produce 1,000kg each season for a total of 2,000kg per year. If he needs 1,250kg to feed his family, he will have 750kg left to sell to provide other things for his family.
We had some smaller demonstration gardens that we averaged 3,172kg per acre with one garden producing 3,501kg per acre!
I’m looking forward to the coming season because our soil is being renewed, we have learned our lesson on using maize stalks from our neighbors, and we used better quality manure as input this time. We should be planting in the coming days!
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