Tool helps farmers implement new technologies
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 College of Agriculture have developed a tool to assist them.
Ricardo Pinto, an assistant professor at MSU’s Northern Agricultural Research Center in Havre, said technology such as precision smart sprayers can detect individual weeds in a field and selectively spray them, at a cost as smart sprayers can be expensive, totaling up to $150,000 in some cases.
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.
