11-29 IAN Farm Apps

 The Idaho Farm Bureau quietly went global recently. If you have an iPhone and want to keep up with the latest Ag news, videos, and Farm Bureau happenings, there's an App for that. Idaho Farm Bureau State Media Manager, Jake Putnam says that the Farm Bureau was looking for the ultimate member benefit and wanted Idaho farmers to have the latest news, so they started looking into Applications last spring. Jake followed the research and PR trends and decided that Farm Bureau needed to be in the thick of the exploding App market.

The iPhone has more than 104 million active App users, followed by BlackBerry with nearly 60 million users and just over 12 million using the Android smart phone. "It's quite obvious, we had to have a presence in the growing market."

“In overwhelming numbers, U.S. farmers keep in touch with the world from the cabs of combines and tractors. They don't have time to get caught up from the home PC so they're doing the bulk of their computing from smart phones. "We're the Voice of Idaho Agriculture and have to be where we're needed most, that's why we developed the iPhone App." The Idaho Farm Bureau Federation News Application can be downloaded from Apple's I-Tune store, or from the iPhone App store that's included in all iPhone and iPod software programs.

"We looked at the studies and found that the typical iPhone user has 30 Apps on their phone, most of the Apps are news and information type applications, we want members to download our App and stay in touch with Idaho Agriculture issues, " said Putnam. This isn't the first foray into social media for the farm organization. The IFBF was the first Farm Bureau on Facebook more than two years ago, they have their own YouTube Channel, photo site on Flickr, Tweets on Twitter, and this blog on Blogger.