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Farming News - Click Here supplement You've got your changeable facias and hands free kit. Now you can access the internet. MICHAEL HOLMES gets connected. Mobile phones, voted best invention of the twentieth century in an NFU magazine poll last year, are changing fast. There are now more mobile phones than households in the UK and, as the market approaches saturation point, the phone companies are coming up with new ways of liberating consumers from their cash. This year's invention marries two new technologies - mobile phones and the internet - to produce the WAP. Wireless Application Protocol technology is still in its infancy. Specially-designed websites, accessible from a WAP phone -known as wapsites - deliver bite-sized pieces of information to a small screen - typically about one square inch. At its best, it should enable farmers to make the sort of informed decisions in the fields that their fathers would have made in the farm office. Many of the current functions are based, as Vodafone's slogan states, on the concept of "the net anywhere". But while portable email and up-to-date weather reports may seem gimmicky to those who have always relied on the Royal Mail and Radio 4, these features are only the bread-and-butter of WAP technology. Interactive functions, where the phone can access programmes built into wapsites, are the real area for development. CattleController.com already uses this technology to enable beef farmers in the fields to make informed decisions about which cattle they would like to sell. Using a WAP phone, a farmer can call up the internet-stored database on a particular animal by entering the last couple of digits of its ear tag. He can then check whether the animal is in a retention or medicine-withdrawal period, which premiums have been claimed on it, how old it is and how long it has been on the farm. The farmer standing in the field can then make an informed decision whether or not to sell. Although not unique, CattleController's use of the interactive technology is atypical. The talk, currently, is of potential; imagination the only limitation. A wapsite can send real-time price updates. This has the potential to empower farmers who trade their commodities to a greater extent than any invention since the telephone itself. If grain prices have been sitting in the low sixties all week and you decide to leave your PC to do some fencing, you would be understandably annoyed if you missed a £5 a tonne price fillip caused by a boat needing a few more deliveries to make a tankerful. At grainman.co.uk they are developing the technology that would allow farmers to register a price that they would like to sell at so that they can be alerted when the price is reached. A message would appear - possibly with a small graph showing previous price movements-asking a farmer to confirm his sale, or allowing him to wait if he believed there was further upside in the market. As farms become "rural based industries" and farmers' margins are squeezed at both sides of the supply chain, the WAP phone could yet become a potent tool for exploiting market fluctuations.
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