Store your maize, or sell now?
Work through whether holding your harvest for the lean season could beat selling now — the price it would need to fetch, the weight you'd lose in store, and the break-even, in plain arithmetic.
Around Mzuzu, maize is cheapest right after the April–June harvest, when many families sell to raise cash — and dearest in the January–February lean season. Holding some of your harvest back can pay, but stored grain loses weight to weevils, and waiting means carrying that risk. This works through the numbers for your own harvest: what you'd get selling now, what the same maize might fetch later in a normal year, and how much the price has to rise just to cover what you'd lose in store.
Roughly — the harvest you could hold back rather than sell now.
Pre-filled with a rough price around 2026-06-15. Prices differ by market and change every week — put in the price you’re actually offered for the closest answer. You can look it up in the crop-prices tool below.
In a typical year, holding this maize to the lean season comes out about MK 61,200 ahead of selling now — before counting the cash you give up in the meantime.
The price has to rise this much just to break even
How prices usually move
Cash now has a value too
Worth knowing
What you lose in store
The weight-loss figures follow measured smallholder maize storage studies for the region (APHLIS / EU JRC; Dijkink and others, 2022). How much you actually lose depends heavily on drying the grain well, keeping the store clean, and whether you treat or use airtight bags. Treat these as a normal-year guide, not a guarantee.
How prices usually move
Across the years, Malawi maize sells for about half as much again at the February lean-season peak as at the harvest low — one of the sharpest seasonal swings of any crop in Africa (Gilbert, Christiaensen & Kaminski, Food Policy 2017, measured Malawi maize seasonality at about 50%). In a normal year the rise is roughly 40–100%; in a drought or after a policy or kwacha shock it can be far more, and in a good year much less.
Where to check and read more
- Crop prices around the northLook up the recent maize price for Mzuzu and nearby markets — the tool shows a price per kilogram, so multiply by about 50 for a bag.
- FEWS NET MalawiWhere the harvest, the lean season and maize prices are tracked through the year.