By Christopher Steele, Louise Cheer

Meat and Livestock Australia is calling on smart phone application developers to help create a new app for cattle farmers across the state.

The app will deliver real time data such as live head-counts, ground coverage figures and feed matching capabilities to cattle farmers in rural areas.

It should streamline existing paper and computer based systems used for forage budgeting and land degradation monitoring.

Queensland University of Technology Faculty of Science and Technology senior lecturer Dr Wayne Kelly can see the potential in such an app.

“If the farmers somehow need to collaborate with one another, share information with one another or simply access central databases provided by the Department of Primary Industries that is the sort of scenario a web-based application would help them,” Dr Kelly said.

Meat and Livestock Australia and State Government investigations are under way to determine the viability of such an app, but its success hinges on the response of station owners who account for Queensland’s 10.5 million head of cattle.

Dr Kelly says the potential for innovation is there, regardless of the industry.

“These sorts of distributed applications are all about sharing information, where you have got a number of different peoples located at different places that somehow want to collaborate or share or get access to some central information,” he said.