Calling All Farmers: Do You Use a Smartphone?

I use my smartphone to check my work and personal emails, my bank account balance, Facebook, the weather and use it as a GPS. I can even keep a recipe box, a to-do list, check the scores of my favorite sports teams and learn guitar chords – all on one device that also makes phone calls. Its actually hard to find something that you can’t do on your smartphone these days- even for farmers!

More and more farmers, growers, and producers will pickup a smartphone as they trade in their old phones. How would a grower use a smartphone application, or ‘app’ as they are called? Immediate uses include general information tools, like weather, news, or finance. Many of the smartphones ship with these types of applications pre-installed. Other uses include specialized seed and soil calculators, ag news, and subscription ag management tools.

Here are a set of links to specific agriculture applications:

* Agriculture Crowdsourcing: These sample apps use the smartphone and crowdsourcing to bring data from the field into a lab database.
* Agriculture Management Information Apps: These types of applications are mostly mobile extensions of a farm or operation management system.
* Agriculture Calculator Apps: These are a sample of some of smartphone tools to help make in field calculations without having to head back to the home office.
* Agriculture Information Resource Apps: These types of apps are primarily used as a lookup tool, either to help identify species, review a piece of regulation, or get the specifics on an issue.
* Agriculture News Apps: These are a sample of agri-media focused news aggregators.
* Weather Apps: These are a sample of smartphone weather applications.”

Source: Agriculture Answering the Call of Smartphones | This Week In Ag

How many of you use smart phones? What do you use them for? Come vote in our poll to tell us what kind of mobile phone you use.

Picture compliments of Steve Tucker, who blogs at http://thetractorcab.wordpress.com, many times from his smartphone.