Two teenagers from Germantown, Maryland, turned a classroom idea into a tool that helps thousands of farmers around the world.
Two teenagers from Germantown, Maryland, turned a classroom idea into a tool that helps thousands of farmers around the world.
Rudra Kunvar, 16, is still a freshman 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 in Poolesville. The idea came after talking with farmers during the Tractor Day organized at the school.
The two men 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’ve narrowed it down to the root cause of there being technology to solve this problem. It’s just technically arduous and not cost-effective, so a lot of these small farms can’t access that level of analysis,” Lee said.
Evion uses artificial intelligence to review basic drone photos, looking at both the color and reflection of the plants captured. The AI then returns a color-coded crop health map. Green means a healthy crop, orange means a moderate crop, and red means a stressed crop. This is a technology that normally requires sensors costing thousands of dollars.
“We wanted to create an alternative that would, in a sense, go directly against these large agricultural monopolies and, you know, provide this technology to small and mid-sized farms,” Kunvar said.
This has had an impact since, according to the USDA, small and medium-sized farms account for 36% of the total value of agricultural production in the United States.
The tool has already reached more than 2,000 farmers across Asia and the U.S. Lee said farmers have told him, “This is going to save us a lot of money.”
Kunvar said they turned down opportunities to sell their tool because they wanted to keep it accessible to small farms, including several in Montgomery County who use it.
“There are a lot of farmers that we have personal connections with, a lot of farmers that have helped us in 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 sectors such as forestry and construction, making advanced analytics affordable for everyone.
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