When maize and soya are cheapest in Ghana, how to check moisture, stop weevils, set up a dry store and work out how many bags your flock really needs.
Halaal Farms Ghana team4 October 2026 · 14 min read
In southern Ghana the cheapest maize of the year arrives at the worst possible moment for keeping it. The major-season crop is harvested from about late July to September, while the rains are still falling and the air is damp, so much of it reaches the market at 15 per cent moisture or more. Safe storage needs 13 per cent or less. A farmer who fills a store with that bargain maize and does nothing else can lose a good part of it to mould and weevils before Christmas.
Maize is normally more than half of a poultry ration by weight, and soya in one form or another supplies most of the protein. If you mix your own feed, or have it mixed at a local mill from a concentrate, buying these two ingredients well and keeping them sound is one of the few places where a small farm can save real money.
Maize prices in Ghana follow the harvests. The price falls when new grain floods the markets and climbs as stocks run down, usually peaking in the lean months before the next major harvest.
| Zone | Main planting | Dry grain harvest | What it means for a feed buyer |
|---|---|---|---|
| South and transition belt, major season | March to April | Late July to September | Plenty of grain and low prices, but harvested in wet weather. Often too moist to store without drying. |
| South and transition belt, minor season | August to September | December to January | Smaller crop. Dries well because harvest runs into the dry season. |
| Northern regions, single season | May to July | October to December | Large volumes that dry down in the harmattan. Usually the best grain for long storage. |
The calendar gives a poultry farmer two buying windows. The first is August to October, when major-season maize from the south and the transition belt around Techiman and Ejura is cheap but needs drying. The second is December to February, when minor-season and northern maize has dried in the field and in the harmattan air. Prices then are often a little above the August low, yet the grain is far safer to keep. If you plan to hold stock into the lean months of April to July, the second window is usually the better one to fill the store.
Soya beans are grown mainly in the northern regions, planted in June and July and harvested from October to December. Unlike maize, the bean cannot simply be milled and fed. Raw soya contains trypsin inhibitors, which block the bird's protein-digesting enzymes, and birds on raw soya grow poorly however much they eat. Heat destroys the inhibitors, so soya reaches poultry feed in two heated forms:
The two are not interchangeable bag for bag. A formula written for soya bean meal will be short of protein if you swap in full-fat soya at the same rate. Under-roasted soya still carries inhibitors and over-roasted soya has damaged protein, so buy from a supplier who can tell you how it was heated. Our article on mixing your own poultry feed explains how the ingredients fit together, and the piece on alternative feed ingredients covers what can partly stand in for soya when it is scarce.
Storage life differs too. Dry whole beans keep for months and soya bean meal for two to three months in a cool dry store. Full-fat soya, with its oil exposed by milling, can turn rancid in a few weeks of Ghanaian heat. Rancid soya smells like old cooking oil, and birds eat less of any feed made with it.
Maize is traded in bags, bowls and tins, and none of them is a fixed weight. The traditional big bag is often well over 100 kg, and how full it is stitched varies from market to market. Compare offers only as a price per kilo. Take a platform scale to the purchase, or pay at a weighbridge, and weigh every bag or at least one in every five.
Then check quality. Draw samples from the top, the middle and the bottom of several bags (traders use a pointed sampling spear, and it is worth owning one), spread them on a clean sack and look for the following.
Grain is alive. Above about 13 per cent moisture, the kernels and the moulds on them respire faster, producing heat and more moisture. The warm damp pocket spreads, insects breed faster in it, and within weeks a bag that looked sound has a hot, caked, musty core. Keep maize for storage at 13 per cent or below. Soya beans, because of their oil, should be a little drier, around 11 to 12 per cent.
A grain moisture meter gives a reading in seconds and pays for itself on the first large purchase. Test several samples, not one, because wet and dry bags are often mixed in a load.
The salt jar test costs nothing. Dry some ordinary table salt in the sun or in a pan until it runs freely. Put a handful of maize and two or three teaspoons of the salt in a clean, completely dry glass jar or bottle, close it, shake for a few minutes and leave it for about fifteen minutes. If the salt clumps or sticks to the glass, the grain is giving off moisture and is too wet for storage, roughly above 15 per cent. If the salt stays loose, the grain is near a safe level. The test tells you "too wet" reliably. It cannot tell you whether dry-looking grain is at 13 or 14 per cent.
If you buy damp maize knowingly, dry it immediately. Spread it no more than about 5 cm deep on tarpaulins or a clean concrete floor, never on bare soil or the road shoulder, where it picks up sand, moisture and mould spores. Turn it with a rake every hour or two, heap and cover it before evening and before rain, and let it cool before bagging.
Drying costs you weight, and you should price that in. The sum is simple:
Dry weight = wet weight × (100 minus wet moisture) ÷ (100 minus dry moisture)
For 1,000 kg bought at 18 per cent and dried to 13 per cent: 1,000 × 82 ÷ 87 = 943 kg. You have lost 57 kg, nearly 6 per cent, before a single weevil has eaten anything. If the wet grain costs, as an example, GH₵ 4.00 a kilo, the dry grain has really cost GH₵ 4.24 a kilo plus the labour of drying. Dry maize at GH₵ 4.20 would have been the cheaper offer.
Three insects do most of the damage to stored maize in Ghana. The maize weevil is a small dark beetle with a snout, whose grubs feed inside the kernel and leave a neat round exit hole. The larger grain borer is a cylindrical dark-brown beetle that tunnels through grain and reduces it to flour, and it can destroy a store far faster than weevils. Grain moths leave webbing on the surface of bags and stacks.
Weevils often arrive already inside the kernels, because the adults lay eggs in maize standing in the field. The others come from old grain dust left in the store and from reused sacks. In warm weather a generation takes roughly five to six weeks, so numbers that look trivial at purchase multiply many times over by the third month. Infested maize has lost starch, so each kilo carries less energy for the bird, and insect activity raises heat and moisture, which invites mould.
How you respond depends on how long the grain will stay.
Hermetic bags (the triple-layer type, widely sold under the PICS name) have two plastic liners inside a woven outer sack. Fill the inner liner, press out the air, twist the neck tightly, fold it over and tie it, then do the same with the second liner and the outer sack. Insects inside use up the oxygen over the following days and stop feeding and breeding. No chemical touches the grain. Three conditions apply: the maize must already be at 13 per cent or below, the liners must not be punctured by hooks, rough floors or rats, and a bag should stay closed until you need it. Open one bag at a time and finish it.
Protectant dusts made for stored grain are mixed with the maize before bagging. Buy only a product labelled for stored grain from a licensed agro-input dealer, follow the label exactly, and keep to any waiting period it states before the grain is used.
Fumigation tablets are not a do-it-yourself job. The tablets sold for fumigating grain release phosphine, a gas that kills people as readily as it kills weevils. Fumigation should be carried out only by a trained operator, under gas-tight sheets, in a store well away from houses and poultry pens, with proper airing afterwards. Never place tablets in a room where anyone sleeps or in a store attached to a dwelling.
A grain store does not need to be expensive, but it has to keep out rain, ground damp, heat and rats.
Keep the grain store separate from the poultry house, and do not keep fuel, pesticides or disinfectants in the same room as feed ingredients.
Never put bags straight on a concrete floor or against a wall. Concrete is cooler than the grain, moisture condenses where they meet, and the bottom layer of bags cakes and moulds. Stack on wooden pallets that lift the bags 10 to 15 cm, so that air moves underneath and you can see rat droppings and spilt grain. If you cannot buy pallets, a frame of straight poles or sawn timber on blocks does the same job.
Leave at least half a metre between the stack and every wall, and a walkway between stacks. The gap keeps bags away from wall damp, lets you inspect all sides and takes away the hidden runway that rats like along a wall.
Build each layer of bags across the one below, the way a mason bonds blocks, so the stack ties itself together. Keep stacks low enough to be lifted down safely by hand, which for most small stores means around eight to ten bags high.
Mark each stack with the date it came in, the source and the moisture reading, and use the oldest first. Keep maize and soya in separate stacks so that a problem in one does not hide in another.
Once a week, walk round the stacks. Push a hand between bags to feel for warmth, look for live insects on the bag surfaces and webbing in the seams, check the floor for fresh droppings, and smell the air when you first open the door. A sweet, musty or sour smell on opening is the earliest warning you will get.
Start from what the birds eat. The steps are the same for any flock.
Use the proportions from your own formula or from the concentrate maker's mixing instructions. For broilers the sum is by batch: total feed per bird to sale weight, times the number of birds, times the maize share. The poultry profit calculator shows how a change in feed cost moves the result for the whole batch.
Six months of maize for those 1,000 layers is about 11,400 kg. Shelled maize weighs roughly 720 kg per cubic metre, so that is about 16 cubic metres of grain. Stacked on pallets with wall gaps and a walkway, it needs a room of at least 4 metres by 4 metres.
All the cedi figures below are examples to show the method. Suppose dry maize is GH₵ 4.00 a kilo in your buying window and rises evenly to GH₵ 6.00 over six months. Buying month by month, your average price would be GH₵ 5.00.
| Item | Good store, own money | Good store, borrowed money | Poor store, borrowed money |
|---|---|---|---|
| 11,400 kg bought at GH₵ 4.00 | GH₵ 45,600 | GH₵ 45,600 | GH₵ 45,600 |
| Bags, liners, labour, transport | GH₵ 2,500 | GH₵ 2,500 | GH₵ 2,500 |
| Cost of money (example: 30 per cent a year, average bag held three months) | None counted | GH₵ 3,420 | GH₵ 3,420 |
| Weight lost in store | 4 per cent | 4 per cent | 12 per cent |
| Usable maize | 10,944 kg | 10,944 kg | 10,032 kg |
| True cost per usable kilo | GH₵ 4.40 | GH₵ 4.71 | GH₵ 5.14 |
In the first case, stocking saves about 60 pesewas a kilo against the GH₵ 5.00 average, roughly GH₵ 6,600 over the six months. With a loan it saves about half that. With a poor store it costs more than buying each month. The saving comes from three things together: a wide seasonal price gap, low losses and cheap money. If any one of them is missing, buy smaller quantities more often.
Whatever you decide about long-term stock, hold a working reserve. Two to four weeks of maize and soya in hand means a late truck or a flooded road does not leave your birds on short rations. For soya bean meal, four to eight weeks of supply is a sensible upper limit, and for full-fat soya three to four weeks. Buy maize whole and mill only what you will mix in the next week or two.
Stored grain earns nothing until birds are eating it, so plan the grain and the flock together. Work back from the day the chicks arrive: the first feed should be mixed a few days before, which means dry maize in the store a week earlier still. When you book broiler chicks or layer chicks from Halaal Farms Ghana, we confirm the price, hatch date and delivery cost before you pay, so you have a firm date to buy against. Starting prices are on the day-old chick price list. If you want a second opinion on quantities for a new flock, advice is free before and after an order: call 024 915 1503 or send the order form with your flock size and start month.
Whole maize dried to 13 per cent moisture or below and protected from insects can keep for six to nine months in a dry, rat-proof store. In ordinary woven sacks with no insect control, expect weevil damage to become serious after two to three months. Once maize is milled it should be used within a couple of weeks, because the broken grain takes up moisture and goes stale and mouldy much faster.
No. Raw soya beans contain substances called trypsin inhibitors that stop birds digesting protein properly, so growth and egg production fall even though the feed looks rich on paper. The beans must be heat treated first, by roasting, toasting or extrusion, or you should buy soya bean meal (soya cake) that was heated during oil extraction. If you roast your own, ask a feed laboratory or nutritionist how to check it is done properly.
For storage longer than about two months, a hermetic bag is the most reliable option without chemicals. It has two plastic liners inside a woven outer sack. When each liner is twisted and tied tightly, insects inside use up the oxygen and stop feeding and breeding. The grain must be properly dry before it goes in, and the bags must be protected from rats and sharp objects that puncture the liners.
It depends on three figures: how far the price rises between harvest and the lean season, how much weight you lose to drying, insects and rats, and what the money costs you while it sits in the store. With a good store and your own savings, bulk buying usually wins. With a leaky store or an expensive loan, the saving can disappear, so work the sum with your own prices before you commit.
Both give similar energy, so birds grow and lay equally well on either. The difference is colour. Yellow maize carries natural pigments that deepen egg yolk colour and give broiler skin and shanks a yellow tint, while white maize gives paler yolks. If your egg buyers like a deep yolk and you feed white maize, ask your feed supplier or nutritionist about pigment sources for the ration.
Written by the Halaal Farms Ghana team. We hatch and import day-old chicks at Opeikuma, Kasoa, and deliver to all 16 regions. This article is general guidance for farmers. For diagnosis and treatment of sick birds, speak to a vet or your district veterinary office.
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