“I can make use of a manual water-pump to enhance smart farming”: voices from Lira City, mid-North Uganda

Abstract

Smart farming has become a world-wide sensation and Uganda is no exemption to this movement. In Uganda, the impact of climate change presents farmers with new challenges and so is the aggregate demand for food in the country. Farmers, in Uganda, represent the biggest constituency and the situation is less likely to change for many years to come. However, there have been a substantial amount of studies, reports documented as well as investigations being circulated with a consistent inference that there are tenacious dangers facing the farmer in Uganda. Thus, evolving and executing proper policies, guidelines and programmes that are aimed to alleviate dangers facing the farmer need to become a pre-eminence for the government than it presently does. Winning the farmer into water-pump technologies as one of the means to enhancing smart farming is one such optimism seeing that the dry spell is now overriding the wet season and the farmer can no longer rely solely on rain fed agri-production. In this study, we examine the budding potential enshrined in this endeavour by looking at manual water pumping in Ober parish in Lira city, mid-north Uganda. It is concluded that this technology has the prospect of transforming a smallholder farmer into a smart farmer thereby the aggregate output per unit