T-Mobile has held a brainstorming session with 12 farmers, a leading app developer and the National Farmers Union to develop farming applications for smartphones.

Some of the ideas were very "out-there" but a couple don't seem too unreasonable. One of the craziest proposals was the idea of a "Flying Sheepdog", which uses smartphone controlled flying drones to herd sheep. Another idea was to use infrared cameras linked to smartphones to scan sheep's heat signals to see if any have gone missing.

The application chosen was a remote controlled scarecrow that you could move using your smartphone. The scarecrow would also have night-vision cameras in its eyes so you could see exactly what was going on . This seems like overkill , but its certainly a novel and fun idea.

The farmers also proposed using QR codes on their cattle to link to a web-page giving all the details about that particular cow. You'd be able to scan the QR codes using any bar-code scanner. Another decent idea was using your smartphones camera to identify diseases that have affected your crops.

3G doubts any of these applications will ever be released, but someone has trialled the QR code idea just for fun !