There's an app for that

Lillian Bowe

PNT staff writer

[email protected]

Even on the farm, there’s an app for that.

Tuesday at the New Mexico Ag Expo, David Yates, a management specialist at Texas A&M AgriLife Extension showed his audience how to bridge large-scale farming and handeld technologies with a seminar on agriculture application of tablets and smart phones.

Yates said there is an app for everything, but it is more difficult to find apps that pertain to agriculture. So he decided to write his own apps that can be used in managing agricultural based operations.

“I learned that designing an app is much harder than it sounds.,” Yates said. “It can be expensive and time consuming.”

Yates said apps simplify many tasks for farmers and ranchers, and taught the audience how to search for apps while also providing a list of apps he uses and a recommendation to ask friends what they use.

Yates had several categories of apps including markets, livestock, agriculture news, weather, agronomy and precision agriculture.

“The apps I showed, I have used myself and they really help around the farm,” Yates said.

One of the apps he highlighted was an app called ID Weed, which was created by the University of Missouri and helps identify weeds and what pesticides to use.

Another app for livestock, CVP Vet, has more than 5,600 pharmaceutical, biological, feed medication and parasiticide products listed. It can be used when a person needs to know the dosage of medication for their animals or needs to know what medication to use when an animal is showing specific symptoms.

Yates said there are apps that can help in management and bookkeeping which make life easier.

“Everyone nowadays has a smartphone,” Yates said. “Why not use it on the farm to help mix pesticides or measure the acreage of a piece of land?”