UI Provides Entrepreneurship Assistance for Trigona Honey Bee Cultivation to Women Farmer Flower Groups in Sembalun, East Lombok
DEPOK – (20/8/2022) It has been two years since global citizens, including Indonesia experienced the Covid19 pandemic outbreak. The pandemic has harmed micro businesses and the lives of farmers, triggered by the decline in public demand due to the implementation of the PSBB / PKM. This is also the condition of Sembalun Sub-district, East Lombok, especially since it is still recovering from the big earthquake disaster in 2018. Sembalun has long been known as a tourist destination for Mount Rinjani Geopark and a producer of agricultural and plantation commodities, including vegetables, nuts, strawberries, coffee, flowers, and garlic. However, it is pretty concerning that farmers’ crops sometimes do not provide profits because of the frequent fall in prices at harvest time. This will exacerbate the poverty condition of the community, where East Lombok is an area with a low HDI.
UI continues to make efforts so farmers do not lose money with falling prices, including increasing the added value of agricultural commodities into processed micro-enterprise products by further processing, such as black onions, packaged coffee, chips, rengginang, and others. The UI community service team has been working in Sembalun since 2017 to encourage women farmer groups (KWT) and MSMEs to increase the added value of their products. Especially for KWT, this year, the UI Team went directly to carry out entrepreneurial assistance activities for KWT Bunga, a women’s business group engaged in breeding and selling typical Sembalun flowers.
The potential of the flower garden on their land requires an increase in productivity and business income. The UI Pengabdi team, which had previously conducted experimental projects on entrepreneurship development in honey bee cultivation in various regions, including NTB, took the initiative to help solve the existing problems.
Located in the Bungan Garden owned by KWT Bungan Mekar near the Sembalun District Office, the UI Service and Empowerment Team led by Dr. Rambat Lupiyoadi (Lecturer FEB UI) on August 18-19 provided training and entrepreneurial assistance for honey bee cultivation. On this occasion, besides being guided directly by Dr. Rambat Lupiyoadi (Lecturer FEB UI), there were also mentor practitioners/entrepreneurs of honey bee cultivation, namely Akso Diana, Spt, Hasan Asari (Entrepreneur of Hasanah Honey Barn Lombok), and Nasrullah (Owner Kebalen Café Mataram).
The entrepreneurs shared their stories of how they applied entrepreneurship to the progress of their business so that the participants could directly discuss and practice together. Starting from preparing human resources managers, bee feed vegetation, colony placement techniques, colony care, disease/predator prevention, how to harvest honey, breaking colonies, and packaging the harvest.
One of the participants, also the head of KWT, Mrs. Nurbaiti, expressed her gratitude and happiness with this training. “We are grateful to the UI team for being willing to go directly to foster us in this entrepreneurial issue of beekeeping. Previously, we only farmed flowers; with the knowledge and help of this trigona bee colony, we know that the productivity of the flower garden will increase with the help of pollination from bees. The honey harvest will also help our children and residents improve nutrition to reduce the stunting rate. Hopefully, we can also increase our income if the colony can grow,” said Nurbaiti.
Contributor:
Dr. Rambat Lupiyoadi
08129782613
