Imagine a Twitter that exists exclusively for ag, cutting out the keyboard warriors, and encouraging old-school phone conversations.
This is what Summit Ag's Heath McWhirter and Emma Ayliffe have created through their social networking app Yacker.
The Griffith-based agronomists want to see Yacker become the ag industry's interactive "phone directory".
Mr McWhirter said the idea had been cooking for the last three to four years but the drought gave them the time to get it up and running.
"Last year we barely had any summer crop irrigation, we were back 20 per cent on the workload that we normally have, so we thought we would invest our time into building this platform."
He explained that the app allows people to post a discussion question and someone can ring or text back that user if they can help.
Getting the timing right
Yacker also recognises that one of the best times to call a farmer is when they're in the ute or tractor.
"The platform is able to work out when people are in their vehicle, through the Bluetooth function," Mr McWhirter said.
"It also means when you're in a situation where you can't spend time typing you can just make a call and continue the conversation."
Mr McWhriter said as part of the development of the platform they did a survey among their customer base and found that 31 per cent of their farmers use Twitter, but only six per cent had engaged in the previous six months.
"We felt that most people on there were observers and they didn't want to put their thoughts out in the public domain," Mr McWhirter said.
"But if they could put the question there and then have a private phone call around that issue, they might be more likely to interact with one another.
"They can still have a text based conversation in public on the app to generate conversation, but the ability to then hit call and discuss things in private, we feel will help to keep the conversation positive and productive."
Ag businesses and farmers jump on board
The first version of the app received good feedback from the ag community, giving Summit Ag the confidence to roll out version two.
"We've got companies like Bayer, Elders and John Deere supporting the platform," Mr McWhirter said.
"The value for them is being able to reach out to their customers directly on the phone rather than just putting out ads."
Farmers have also found the platform useful, examples include a Goulburn farmer who asked how to grow premier digit grass and was connected to an agronomist, now based in Narromine, who had previously lived in hill country and had experience with digit grass.
"Another example is a farmer from out near Euston had some barley that he wanted to bury it for drought proofing his farm because he didn't have on-farm silos, and a grower from Carrathool got online and explained to him what he does when he has surplus grain," Mr McWhirter said.
Yacker has been named a finalist in Syngenta's innovation awards and was recently accepted into Farmers2Founders ag tech innovation accelerator Bootcamp.
"It's getting momentum slowly but surely, we're just trying to get more and more users on board because we know the more users we have the more beneficial it is as a platform as we will start to increase the knowledge base," Mr McWhirter said.
