A NEW free mobile app for farmers has recently been launched with a few posts on Facebook.

Within the first four days the app had more than 500 farmers using it and now the system has thousands of cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, horses and even a few water buffalo being accounted for by the system. Already the app is being used by farmers as far away as New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, USA and India.

The app, called Livestock Count was developed by gloversure, a leading mobile app and web design/development company based in Welshpool and Chester.

The MD and founder Richard Glover-Davies is a farmer’s son and the idea for the app was born when his dad was bringing more ewes and lambs to Richard’s small holding every other day during lambing season.

Richard was having to phone his dad to find out how many were meant to be in each field when Richard was checking they were okay.

Richard said: “As a company we have been fortunate that we have been able to continue working with all the team working from home. During the first lockdown our app development team had a number of client projects put on hold so instead of furloughing some of the team we decided to build some of our own apps and platforms and launch them under our own brand, this is the first of five systems we will be launching over the next few months.”

The app allows farmers to input the number of each type of livestock in each of their fields as well as making notes.

If a farmer updates the numbers, each of the workers on the same farm will receive the updated numbers; the app also works offline. If a farmer and his or her family go on holiday they can now easily get a friend/neighbour to check their stock as they can give them access to the app and they can walk around the farm and the livestock numbers and notes are shown on a map along with the location of where the person currently is.

Gloversure has won many awards over the years and is a 20 strong team of designers and developers.

Richard added: “The feedback has been very positive from farmers with many saying how user friendly it is. The app is a simple idea but some of the best ideas are simple ones; it’s a handy little tool that will help farmers all over the world. Since launching the app we have already released a new version of the app that adds a couple of features that have been requested and also makes it faster to load data as well.” To install the app go to https://gloversure.co.uk/livestock-count