Hi Everyone,

Wefarmit develop farm productivity tools for knowledge and farm information management. I founded Wefarmit and I am a farmers son. I believe it often takes a farmer to innovate for farming, for me its all about close observation and talking to farmers. Having grown up and worked on the family farm I had a natural interest in agricultural systems, I went on to study Biology at Bristol University and grew an interest in IT at the same time. That led me to a career as a clinical data manager and I spent 10 years designing web based systems for collecting data from global clinical trials. The pull back to the land was strong and I had always hoped to be able to return to agriculture. At the same time I saw that many farmers were struggling with ag data management and marketing their produce so I decided to help them with technology. That idea has now become Wefarmit, we are a social network for farmers, we have a mobile app where you can connect with other farmers and markets and are developing some really cool tools to help agriculture. We create farm apps for interconnectivity, productivity and compliance. Our first productivity app for cattle keepers is HERDit available on Google Play for free https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=BovineHerdRegister.BovineHerdRegister.  We are developing HERdit with feedback from farmers around the world and soon will be pushing out the international update allowing for local tag format variation. We are including  features for managing medicines and performance recording over the coming weeks.

Wefarmit App Labs also offer development services, we can customise any of our apps for specific local and government needs so if you want to explore ICT solutions to benefit farmers near you we can help and we offer many years experience in data systems development coupled with practical farming knowledge and a passion to help farmers feed the world sustainably by adopting ICT's. It is great to have a forum like  e_agriculture and very reassuring to meet so many others trying to achieve this goal.

Warm regards

John Batchelor @TeamWefarmit

UK uplands smartphone trial (Bodmin Moor Livestock Initiative)

At the end of October I will be helping to kick off a smartphone project with 12 farmers in the UK uplands. They are all livestock farmers farming on Bodmin Moor and I am helping with the project. The plan is to equip 12 local farmers that have shown an interest in ICT but have little experience of it. We will be training them up in the use of mobile devices and helping them make use of devices in their day to day work.  The problem is still one of connectivity in rural areas.  I know it is hard to believe in the UK but a number of farmers (including myself until 3 years ago) had no access to broadband of any kind be it wired or wireless.  Although 3G has improved and we are soon promised 4GLTE the problem is bigger than that. The digital divide between urban and rural areas has a longer lasting effect and once rural areas do get connected that is just the start of the battle. Training and ag tech mentoring schemes are what is needed to get the rural population up to the level of ICT skills. Training can come in many forms, e-learning and instructor led even things like playing Angry Birds just to get used to touch screens.  The younger generation take this for granted sometimes but these basic ICT skills are missing in a number of "not spot" areas.  I imagine training challenges could take longer to overcome than the network coverage problem.

Hi!  I am John Batchelor, farmers son, clinical data manager & founder of WeFarmIt.  We are a social enterprise developing social networking platforms and cloud computing for the farming and food community. We aim to build food communities everywhere and plug them into the Wefarmit "Farm Cloud" platform and associated apps like the first one we released a few weeks ago "HERDit". This is a simple app that we are expanding on and will soon be bringing out an international update. Despite it being created initially for UK farmers to meet local regulations we are finding farmers everywhere are using it to keep track of their herd. We have a load of great features we are working on for future releases.   

We currently do all of the above on a shoestring budget and with the help of volunteer coders I have been lucky enough to find. Finding proper funding to take us to the next step is now our main priority. My long term goal is to give every farmer access to quality and affordable (free where possible) web and mobile apps for interconnectivity, productivity and compliance. We are going for a ride on The Digital Tractor and we want you to join us!:)