A real life Angry Birds app, a QR code-enabled cow, and a GPS farm management app were three of the ideas to come out of a brainstorming day involving T-Mobile and members of the farming community. 

The aim of the event was to raise awareness of the benefits smartphone technology can bring to small businesses such as farms. A dozen British farmers were brought together with representatives from the National Farmers Union (NFU), EBLEX (the organisation for beef and sheep farmers), as well as app developers from M&C Saatchi Mobile. 

The cow QR code idea was put into practise on the day – with a QR code sprayed onto a real cow, which linked to a page detailing the cows vital statistics such as its age, weight, breed, and vaccination history. 

The Real Angry Birds app idea involves controlling the movements of a scarecrow through a smartphones 3G connection. The app would also use heat-sensitive infrared cameras located in the scarecrows eyes to monitor problem birds and check for sheep rustlers at night – sending push alerts to the farmer if the number of heat signals in a field decreases. 

Other ideas included:

• A real-time farm management app that uses a smartphones GPS chip to plot their land and calculate harvest sizes – linking to real-time market information
• An arable disease management app, which can identify crop diseases using photos of the plant
• A location-aware health and safety app for managing staff training – informing staff whether or not they are authorised to use various machinery
• A flying sheepdog drone app that allows farmers to supplement the efforts of their sheepdog with flying drones controlled by smartphones. 

The ideas were developed on the day and collated by T-Mobile in a whitepaper – called Smartphone Apps for Farmers. 

T-Mobile says that research in the US indicates that 94 per cent of farmers now own a smartphone – a trend that it sees developing in the UK. 

Martin Stiven, VP of business at T-Mobile, says: “With farmers being one of our most important customers, we were keen to find out how mobile technology could really supercharge their business. People frequently talk about small business owners being wedded to their smartphones but overlook that farmers are micro businesses in their own right, often adopting mobile technology well ahead of the field.”

T-Mobile has launched a business tariff aimed at farmers, which includes a smartphone on a 12-month contract as well as ruggedised cases to protect the phone in the field. 

Ed Shires, a 24-year-old farmer from Buckinghamshire, attended the brainstorm. He says: “The brainstorm brought up some exciting smartphone app ideas that could really help farmers. The most interesting thing for me is how this technology can help cut costs. Some of the farming technology you need can easily run into the thousands. Why spend that sort of money when a 69p smartphone app could achieve similar results?” 

Stiven says that the app ideas floated could see commercial release. “If mobile developers are as excited as we are by these apps, we predict theyll be available to download by the end of 2012,” he says.