BASF has launched an new innovative mobile phone app that will help growers identify weeds on their farms, which is to be followed by a new cereal diseases app this season.

Sarah Mountford-Smith, cereal herbicide manager for BASF, says the new weed app contains 140 arable grass and broad-leaved weeds and more than 1,000 photos to aid identification.

Users of the app can take a picture of the weed they are trying to identify, which remains as a smaller image on screen while users filter weeds out by choosing characteristics relating to the weed, such as cotyledon and leaf shape.

Once the selection has been narrowed, growers can swipe through a slide show of similar weeds to find the correct one, says Mrs Mountford-Smith. “Each weed comes with additional information and also, where appropriate, some information on similar weeds that it could be mistaken for.”

Users can also search for weeds based on common name, Latin name or via a free text search.

The company is set to launch another new app, this one giving growers access to its popular Encyclopaedia of Cereal Diseases on iPhone, Blackberry and Android.

The mobile version of the encyclopeadia has been developed in conjunction with the HGCA and cereal disease expert Bill Clark, allowing users to identify all of the UK’s cereal diseases.

It will offer easy reference to cereal disease, including information such as common name, pathogens responsible, symptoms, life cycle, importance of the disease to UK growers and photograph allowing identifications.

BASF’s two exising apps are also being relaunched with additional features. The popular green area index app will offer the same accuracy for growers drilling in wider rows compared to conventional widths.

Designed to calculate the green area index of oilseed rape, the tool uses digital images of the crop to calculate the GAI. Users will be able to vary the row width on a drop-down option on the tool, allowing width adjustment up to 30cms.

“This fine tuning will make the GAI measure for wider row crops much more accurate,” says Sarah Clarke of ADAS.

Finally, the Canopy Assessment Tool (CAT) – developed for winter cereals – which allows an accurate and consistent assessment of crop nitrogen content (in kgN/ha) from its GAI and crop lodging risk from a digital photograph, has been expanded this year to include winter barley.

The weed app will cost £2.99 and will initially be available for the iPhone, with Android and Blackberry versions to follow by the end of the year. The cereal diseases and improved GAI apps will be available soon from Apple.