Sprayers
Smart Spray Annual ROI Calculator
Tool Developed at Montana State Aims to Help Farmers Implement New Technologies
By Reagan Cotton, MSU News Service
In the constantly changing environment of precision agriculture, it can be difficult to winnow through the array of available tools and technologies becoming available for use by farmers and ranchers. To help guide those decisions, two faculty members in the Montana State University( MSU) College of Agriculture have developed a tool for estimating the return on investment associated with one of the most highimpact precision ag resources.
Ricardo Pinto, an assistant professor at MSU’ s Northern Agricultural Research Center in Havre, heard from producers that herbicide resistance in weeds was becoming an increasingly intractable problem. New technology, such as precision smart sprayers, can detect individual weeds in a field and selectively spray them, as well as enable producers to apply specific herbicide blends that are more likely to kill herbicide-resistant plants. But tools such as smart sprayers can
Ricardo Pinto, an assistant professor at the Montana State University Northern Agricultural Research Center. Photo courtesy Ricardo Pinto. be expensive, totaling up to $ 150,000 in some cases.
“ Depending on your operation, it makes sense,” said Pinto.“ You can have your payback period in one, maybe two years, depending on the acres in your weed infestation. We had an opportunity to develop a platform where producers can say,‘ Does this precise spray technology work in my situation or not?’”
To make those questions easier to answer, Pinto and Kelsey Larson developed the Smart Spray Annual ROI Calculator, a free and easy-to-use digital tool where producers can plug in numbers relevant to their own operations and determine how much time it would take for them to save enough money to justify the cost of new tools. Users plug in values such as their current herbicide application rate and frequency, the estimated weed coverage in their field, the price of a smart spray system and their field acreage. The tool then calculates savings in both dollars and reduced chemical application.
For Pinto and Larson, who both conduct outreach through MSU Extension in addition to their research, the opportunity to develop resources that producers can use on their farms was motivating.
“ Many of these environmental or precision agriculture practices are going to make sense on some operations for some people, but they ' re not going to make sense everywhere. There are no cut-and-paste solutions,” said Larson, who grew up in Bozeman and received her doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the faculty in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Economics in January.“ It was exciting to have a concrete way to help Montana producers to figure out what makes sense for them.”
Smart spray technologies use sensors that can identify a single weed among crop plants, turning nozzles on and off automatically to apply herbicides and pesticides only where they are necessary. When properly implemented, they can save time and money, vastly decreasing the amount of input necessary to manage weeds.
Because farmers can plug in the specific values for their operation, the new calculator can provide tailored information based on the variations across Montana’ s ecosystems and geography. Less herbicide and pesticide application positively impacts soil health and saves water as well as costly herbicides.
24 | 800-247-2000 | 515-955-1600 | April 2026