Two Germantown, Maryland, teens turned a classroom idea into a tool that is helping thousands of farmers worldwide.
Rudra Kunvar, 16, is still a junior at Poolesville High School, and Jacob Lee, 18, graduated last year and is now a freshman at Stanford University. Together, they launched a startup called Evion while they were classmates at Poolesville. The idea came after talking to farmers during the school’s Tractor Day.
The two asked a farmer if they knew how healthy their farmland was, and the answer surprised the teens.
“He said, ‘We don’t know. We’re guessing,'” Lee said.
At that moment, an idea was born.
“We narrowed this down to the root cause of the technology to solve this problem does exist. It’s just technically arduous and not very cost-efficient, which leads to a lot of these smaller-scale farms not being able to access this level of analysis,” Lee said.
Evion uses artificial intelligence to examine photos from basic drones, looking at both the color and reflection of the plants captured. The AI then returns a color-coded crop health map. Green means healthy, orange is moderate and red signals stressed crops. It is technology that normally requires sensors costing thousands of dollars.
“We wanted to make an alternative that, like, would, in a sense, go directly against these large ag (agricultural) monopolies, and, you know, provide this technology to low- to midscale farms,” Kunvar said.
It has had an impact as small and mid-sized farms, according to the USDA, account for 36% of the total value of farm production in the United States.
The tool has already reached more than 2,000 farmers across Asia and the U.S. Lee said farmers told him, “This is going to save us a ton of money.”
Kunvar said they have turned down opportunities to sell their tool because they want it to remain accessible to smaller farms, including several in Montgomery County that use it.
“There’s a lot of farmers that we have personal connections with, a lot of farmers that have helped us out in various different ways. And we wanted to find a way to give back to them,” Lee said.
The teens hope to expand Evion beyond agriculture into industries such as forestry and construction, making advanced analysis affordable for everyone.
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