Ube Planting Calculator
How many hills fit your land, how many kilos of setts you need to fill them, and what that planting material is worth. At the DA guide's spacing a hectare takes about 20,000 setts, two to three tonnes of tuber, which is why this is the first sum worth doing.
Result
- Hills to plant
- 20,000
- Area
- 10,000 sqm
- Hills per hectare
- 20,000
- Planting material
- 2,000 kg
- Value of setts
- ₱160,000
Got your plant count? Put it through the profit calculator to see what the cycle returns and what price it has to clear.
Profit calculatorThe tonnes of ube you bury before you grow any
At the DA guide's 20,000 setts per hectare and 100 to 150g a sett, a hectare needs 2,000 to 3,000 kg of planting material. Whether you buy that in or hold it back from your own harvest, it is a real cost: every kilo planted is a kilo not sold. Plans that treat home-saved setts as free are quietly understating what the cycle costs. If you are buying in, our verified ube planting materials come from export-grade tubers with the variety named.
Tighter spacing raises your hill count and your yield ceiling, but it raises planting material cost in exact proportion, and it crowds a climbing vine that needs light. Loosening spacing is the cheapest way to cut the cost of getting a crop in the ground.
Frequently asked questions
How many ube plants fit in one hectare?
It depends on spacing. The DA Region 02 Ubi Production Guide (2012) recommends 20,000 to 27,778 setts per hectare, which is what 1m x 0.5m and 0.6m x 0.6m spacing give you. A hectare is 10,000 square metres, so at 1m x 0.5m each plant occupies half a square metre and a hectare holds 20,000. Wider spacing, such as 1m x 1m, holds 10,000. Tighter spacing raises plant count and planting material cost, and it also raises competition for light and nutrients on a climbing vine.
How many kilos of ube setts do I need per hectare?
Multiply your number of hills by the weight of each sett. Setts usually weigh 100 to 150 grams, so at the DA guide's 20,000 setts per hectare you need 2,000 to 3,000 kg of planting material. This is why planting material is one of the two largest cost lines in an ube planting: you are burying two to three tonnes of saleable tuber per hectare before you grow anything.
What is a sett?
A sett is the piece of tuber used to plant the next crop, cut from a harvested ube and left to sprout. Bigger setts generally establish faster and give the plant more reserves to draw on, but they cost more in forgone sales, since every kilo planted is a kilo not sold. That trade-off is the reason sett weight is an input here rather than a fixed assumption.
Should I keep setts from my own harvest or buy them?
Keeping your own avoids a cash outlay but costs you the sale of that tuber, so it is not free either way: the honest way to account for it is the market value of what you held back. This calculator prices planting material at whatever per-kilo figure you enter, so you can compare buying in against holding back your own.