Facebook
X (Twitter)
Reddit
Pinterest
Tumblr
LinkedInPosts Tagged: app
North American Meat Insitiute Releases MyMeatUp App for IPhones and Androids
The following came from the NAMI Lean Trimmings newsletter.
Meat Institute to Launch MyMeatUp App Tuesday. The Meat Institute will nationally launch its new MyMeatUp app on Tuesday morning with a broad release to mainstream media outlets as well as college publications. The release is part of a larger marketing strategy for the app over the next several months. MyMeatUp is the first-of-its-kind mobile app aimed at helping consumers become more confident when buying meat and poultry. The free app is the only available app with a full guide to beef, pork, lamb and veal retail meat cuts, and draws on content from www.MyMeatUp.org, a popular resource that was launched in 2016.
Meat Institute staff and members have assisted in giving the app a solid rating prior to release. MyMeatUp currently has 29 five-star reviews in the Apple app store, which should help its searchability. Members who have not downloaded the app are strongly encouraged to do so and provide positive reviews. To download the iPhone version, click here. The Android version is available here.
An App for Bee Health
So you want to know about bee health? Yes, there's an app for that--and you're welcome to download it for free. Our good neighbor to the north of us, Alberta Agriculture, has just developed Phase 1 of its “Bee Health." "It focuses on bee diseases symptoms, diagnosis and...
A frame from the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility, UC Davis. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Want to know about bee health? There's an app for that. Alberta Agriculture has created Phase 1 and is working on Phase 2. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
New app helps strawberry growers manage pests
Extending research information is an important part of UC ANR Cooperative Extension. As communication technology is advancing every day, using modern channels of communication are important for successfully reaching out to growers, pest control advisers (PCAs), and other key players of the agriculture industry. Traditional newsletters (Central Coast Agriculture Highlights), blogs (Strawberries and Vegetables and Pest News), Facebook, Twitter (@calstrawberries and @calveggies), Tumblr, and online repositories of meeting handouts and presentations are some of the tools that play a critical role in making important information about the Central Coast strawberry and vegetable extension program readily available to the agricultural industry. The popularity of smartphones has made this information even easier to access.
Smartphone applications are becoming popular in agriculture to provide information and for decisionmaking. However, because there were no such applications to help California strawberry and vegetable growers, IPMinfo was developed. The first version of the app was released in December 2014 and an updated version was released in April 2015.
Growers can find information on invertebrate pests, including as aphids, cyclamen mite, greenhouse whitefly, lygus bug, spider mite, and western flower thrips. Diseases include angular leaf spot, anthracnose, botrytis fruit rot, charcoal rot, common leaf spot, fusarium wilt, leaf blotch and petiole blight, leather rot, mucor fruit rot, phytophthora crown rot, powdery mildew, red stele, rhizopus fruit rot, verticillium wilt, and viral decline. Each pest entry has information on biology, damage symptoms, and management options with associated photos. Links provided in the management section will take the user to the UC IPM website for more detailed information, especially about various control options.
To download the app on iPhones, go to the App Store and search for IPMinfo.
Author: Surendra Dara, UC ANR Cooperative Extension advisor, San Luis Obispo and Ventura counties
Hackathon movement connects consumers to food
On a Friday evening in a San Francisco conference room, food and technology leaders – including nutrition expert Carl Keen, a UC Davis professor affiliated with the UC Agriculture and Natural Resources Ag Experiment Station – spoke to a mixed audience on the need for innovation in adapting populations across the world to changing food systems.
In the crowd, one inspired undergraduate student from UC Davis thumbed together some notes on his phone. The next day he stood in front of everyone at the event – more than 250 in all – and pitched his newly formed idea for a nutrition app.
It drew a small team: a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, a UC Davis nutritionist and a UC Berkeley student. Over the next 40 hours they developed a software application that matches safe foods to patient medications. With the final presentations Sunday evening, the judges announced the winners.
Their project, called Took that? Eat this., won first place at the 2015 Food Hackathon. They now have sponsors and are developing their idea into a real consumer product. They are also flying out to the World Expo in Milan, Italy, in September – the first devoted to food and where an even larger food-themed hackathon will take place.
(Food Hackathon from FounderLY on Vimeo)
Breaking down the silos
“It's powerful how much happens in such a short period of time,” says Bob Adams, innovation adviser for the UC Davis World Food Center and a mentor for the hackathon teams. “It was a great experience for all the UC Davis students who participated, because they don't normally interact in projects with students from other programs.”
With nearly 9,000 total hours spent in developing the 18 different projects, the hackathon was declared by the organizers a success and a testament to the power of crowd sourcing.
A group of passionate techies, foodies, scholars, investors and entrepreneurs shut in a room for two days pushed them like never before to apply their diverse expertise toward tackling some of the biggest problems facing food and ag.
A university connecting ag and nutrition
Research and industry leaders are looking to this model as one way to seed California's innovation ecosystem across the state's agricultural horizons. As another example, Mars, Inc., which co-sponsored the hackathon, is investing in a new type of university-industry partnership with UC Davis and the World Food Center by establishing the Innovation Institute for Food and Health.
“All of us win from these new and needed collective investments in innovation in food, agriculture and health,” writes Mars chief scientist Harold Schmitz in a recent Sacramento Bee op-ed.
Howard-Yana Shapiro, also a Mars chief scientist and a UC Davis fellow, sees innovative food technology projects like those crafted at the hackathon as this decade's biggest investment arena.
“The next, larger human generation will face food challenges ranging from climate change and water stress to growing demands for upmarket foods,” he wrote in a LinkedIn article. “But from what I saw at the hackathon, the next generation is on it.”
See the original story by the UC Davis World Food Center.
Remembering the Wild Bees
Native bee enthusiast Celeste Ets-Hokin of the Bay Area is on a mission: she wants residents to provide habitat for wild bees, including bumble bees, sweat bees, miner bees, mason bees, digger bees and long-horned bees. Earlier this year she came out with an app, "Wild Bee Gardens," the...
"Wild Bee Gardens" is the first known conservation app for North American native bees.
A sunflower bee foraging on an echinacea flower. (Photo by Celeste Ets-Hokin)
