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Data sources

Where the seed corpus gets its numbers, and — more importantly — where it does not.

The seed is fabricated data. Public statistics make it realistic; they do not make it verified, and nothing in this file changes the fact that every record the seed writes carries dataset: 'seed' and is invisible to a live read. See 0017.

Three rules govern everything below, and they are not style preferences.

  1. No public figure ever becomes basis: 'measured'. measured means somebody put a container on a scale and the weights are on file; unit_conversion_measured_shows_sample in migration 0012 enforces the sample. A national mean from a publication is published_standard when there is a citable standards body behind it and assumed_default otherwise. Synthesising a sample array from a published mean would be fabricating provenance, which is the exact fraud the schema exists to detect.
  2. A distribution nobody can trace back is indistinguishable from an invented one. So the invented ones say so, in this file and in the code.
  3. No source here closes an open decision. D2, D5, D7 and D8 are questions about cooperative practice. No dataset records practice.

What was actually obtained

Checked on 2026-08-03. "Obtained" means downloaded and parsed in this repository's toolchain, not "exists on a website".

Source Status Informs
FAOSTAT QCL bulk (Africa) Obtained Yield per crop
FAO GIEWS Uganda Country Brief Obtained Season calendar, planting and harvest offsets
Uganda National Panel Survey (LSMS-ISA) Not obtained — login required Nothing
UBOS Not obtained — nothing machine-retrievable found Nothing
IFPRI Dataverse Open, but holds nothing relevant Nothing

FAOSTAT — Crops and livestock products (QCL)

Where these figures may and may not be used. CC BY 4.0 permits reuse with attribution, but the FAO Statistical Database Terms of Use additionally bar use "in connection with promoting a commercial enterprise". A lender view is a document put in front of a financier to show what the product can do, which is promoting a commercial enterprise, and attribution does not cure that — the restriction is on the purpose, not on the crediting.

So the seed takes a YieldProfile:

  • faostat — the real figures. The default, for internal work, where the realism is the point.
  • demo — DEMO_YIELD_KG_PER_HA, invented outright, for anything shown outside. Not a rounding of the FAOSTAT numbers, because a rounding is still derived from them.

Both are reduced by SMALLHOLDER_YIELD_HAIRCUT and both are printed in the header of every artifact the seed produces, so a reader can always tell which one they are looking at. pnpm seed -- --profile demo.

Figures used, Uganda, element Yield, unit kg/ha:

Item 2022 2023 2024
Maize (corn) 2199.6 2182.3 2173.9
Beans, dry 799.8 853.9 918.8

The 2024 figures are the ones the seed uses. They inform NATIONAL_YIELD_KG_PER_HA in apps/kernel/src/seed/fixtures.ts, which sets the size of every harvest record.

Read this before using the number. FAOSTAT's Area harvested counts area actually harvested, so land in a bimodal-rainfall district that is cropped and harvested twice in one year is counted twice. Production ÷ Area harvested is therefore a per-harvest yield already, and the seed applies it to a single season without adjustment. Sense check: 2173.9 kg/ha × 0.404686 ha/acre ≈ 880 kg per acre, or about nine 100 kg bags — which is where Ugandan smallholder maize is usually quoted. If that reading is wrong, every harvest in the corpus is out by roughly a factor of two, and this paragraph is where to start looking.

Two limits on the figure itself. It is a national annual mean, so it carries no district variation — Kapchorwa and Nebbi get the same central value, and the spread around it is invented. And FAO's additional terms prohibit use "for or in conjunction with the promotion of a commercial enterprise", which is a live constraint for a commercial product: it is fine as a seed parameter, and it is not fine in a sales deck.

FAO GIEWS — Uganda Country Brief

Two statements are used verbatim as calendar facts:

  • Bimodal rainfall areas, covering most of the country: first season crops "were planted in February and March 2026, and will be harvested in June and July". The first rainy season "normally extend[s] from March to June".
  • Karamoja, unimodal, in the northeast: the rainy season "normally spans from April to August".

These inform registry.season_calendar (migration 0018) and the day offsets in DAY in apps/kernel/src/seed/generate.ts.

What is missing and stays missing. This issue of the brief says nothing about the second season. So registry.season_calendar has no 2026B row, and the read API returns nothing for it rather than a plausible guess. That gap is the point of the table: filling it later is an INSERT with a citation, not a migration.

Uganda National Panel Survey (LSMS-ISA) — not obtained

This is by a distance the best source for the parameters that are still invented: plot area by region, crop mix, household composition, plot-level yield. It was not obtained. …/get-microdata returns "To access data for this study, user must be logged in", and registration is a manual, approved process rather than a click-through. The public DDI export (/metadata/export/3902/json) carries the study description only — no variable-level summary statistics, so there is not even an indirect route to a mean.

This is a finding, not a task. Someone with an account should pull the agriculture module and revisit the invented distributions below. Until then they stay marked invented.

UBOS — not obtained

Reachable, and no agricultural table is retrievable without a browser: the agriculture landing page links no data files, and site search is client-side. The Statistical Abstract and the Annual Agricultural Survey are cited widely enough that they clearly exist; neither was found at a stable URL from here.

IFPRI Dataverse — open, and not relevant

The search API is open and works. Uganda holdings are dominated by ASTI, which is agricultural research and development spending — nothing about plots, yields or cooperative structure. Recorded so the next person does not spend the same hour.

Parameters that are still invented

Every one of these is a number somebody made up, including the spread around the values that do have a citation. They are listed so that "seeded from public data" cannot be said about the corpus as a whole.

Parameter Where Why it is invented
Plot area, and area planted generate.ts, rng.normalWithin(1.2, 0.6, …) acres UNPS is the source and is gated
Variation around the national yield HARVEST_YIELD_SPREAD FAOSTAT publishes a mean, not a distribution
Smallholder reduction on the national yield SMALLHOLDER_YIELD_HAIRCUT = 0.72 A FAOSTAT national yield is total production over total area harvested, so the denominator includes commercial estates with irrigation, certified seed and mechanised handling. Every farmer here holds one to four acres. Applying the national mean to them overstates production, and every derived figure inherits it. 0.72 sits inside the range regional smallholder studies tend to report, but no single publication supports this figure, so it is an assumption and not a source
The entire demo yield table DEMO_YIELD_KG_PER_HA Invented outright for external use, deliberately not a rounding of the FAOSTAT figures — a rounding would still be derived from them. See the profile note below
Crop mix by region one commodity per coop, in COOPS No district-level source obtained
Cooperative membership size 20 farmers per coop No source; chosen to keep the corpus legible
Deliveries per farmer, and their size rng.int(2, 3), rng.int(3, 14) bags No source
Confirmation rate, mass-balance drift COOPS Deliberate fixture defects, per 0023
Bag weights and their spread COOPS.bagMean, bagStddev Deliberate fixture defects
Proportion of farmers holding a NIN 0.65 No source
Clock-skew rates 0.05 and 0.01 No source

The adversarial cases in the last three rows are not candidates for replacement with real data. Coop C's factor is wrong by eighteen percent because a work order says it must be; that is a defect the corpus is built around, not a distribution to be improved.