M-Farm, an award-winning Kenyan agribusiness company, has launched a new mobile application in partnership with Samsung that allows farmers to receive accurate, real-time crop price information daily.

The application will be available on both Android and Samsung’s Bada based phones.

M-Farm has already achieved success with its SMS transparency tool for farmers, which allows subscribers to obtain price information, buy farm inputs and find buyers for their produce via text messages.

The new application allows constant access to five major Kenyan markets to Kenyan farmers, who have suffered from a lack of price information making them susceptible to heavy cuts being taken by middlemen.

Additional monthly price analyses allow farmers to make more informed decisions on what seeds to plant and where best to sell them.

With Kenya’s mobile penetration now standing at 71.3%, and 99% of internet users accessing the web via their phones, the creators of M-Farm believe they can help farmers using the increasing prevalence of mobile phones.

“As long as you are connected to the internet the new application can help farmers,” said Maureen Gitau, marketer at M-Farm, who said the free application was downloaded more than 100 times on its first day of availability.

“They don’t have to ask every day, the prices for the last six days are there. With SMS we had to train them a lot, with this app it is much easier, you just load it and the information is there”

The original M-Farm SMS tool was launched after winning the IPO48 competition, a 48-hour boot camp event where web and mobile startups competed for $12400 of capital investment.

The business was founded by three young Kenyan women – Jamila Abass, Susan Oguya and Linda Kwamboka – who met through the iHub in Nairobi. Their award-winning idea was developed at the m:lab incubator in the same building. It already has 4,000 subscribers having started in November 2010.