Deconstructing smart farming from the perspective of beekeeping technologies: voices from Lira city, mid-north Uganda

Abstract

Smart farming in less-developing nations and or societies has been discouraged with a pretext that it is an impossible venture to undertake yet every community in the world can be empowered to embrace smart farming for sustainable development and food security. Examining smart farming openings using bee keeping, builds upon our understanding of traditional systems and provides a lens to examine contemporary mechanisms to transformation while applying smart farming initiatives to practice. We identify three key values of bees, namely medicinal, economic and organic, which provide a clear-cut entry into the thinking of smart farming necessary for examining such technologies. This article presents bee-keeping as implemented by Trained Apiary Farmers (TAF) Agri- Tourism Farm in an urban setting of Lira city, and examines it along the three dimensions of medicinal, economic and organic. We conclude that adoption of bee-keeping technologies offers a great hope for the city’s economy, therapeutic supplements, and organic needs in countless ways. The study is a huge boost to the academia seeing that medics are now turning to herbal curation, in which bee-keeping is a potential resource.