ASHBURN, VA – Four Loudoun County high school students decided to see if they could fight fire with fire – in this case, to try to combat invasive farm pests with another little buzzing, flying creation: drones.
Sumedh Pendyala, Praneel Mukherjee, Jayesh Reddy Muktaparapu and Anekan Naicker, all 17 years old and students in the Academies of Loudoun magnet program, decided to see if drone and artificial intelligence technology could help them get ahead of bugs, molds and other garden blights on a large scale.
The teens say they were motivated to see if they could find a more efficient way to do crop surveillance, rather than having farmers walk their fields.
According to the boys, pests like spotted lanternflies, plum curculios, cucumber beetles, harlequin beetles and cabbage worms are very good at hiding from human eyes, and by the time the result of an infestation is visible, it might be too far gone to control with pesticides or other chemicals.
What if an affordable piece of technology could spot that distress sooner?
Enter FloraFly. The teens modified a lightweight commercial drone and paired it with a small Raspberry Pi computer for processing, computer vision, mapping sensors and artificial intelligence that problem-solves through action. They aimed to help farmers save crops without having to buy expensive technology or resort to broad-spectrum pesticides.
The teens told Patch they showed up at local farms in person to pitch their friendly neighborhood drone. "We visited local farmers markets across Northern Virginia, reached out to regional agricultural extension networks, and cold-called family-owned operations," the team told Patch over email.
"Farmers are understandably cautious about novel tech, so our pitch was simple: free early-detection surveys with zero disruption to their daily operations," they said. "Once a few initial growers saw the real-time crop heatmaps and caught localized issues early, word-of-mouth spread."
According to the teens, they've now connected with 26 regional operations, among them vegetable farms, orchards and specialized berry growers.
To gauge their results, they asked farmers to report three things: baseline losses for targeted crops in the seasons before the drone test, verification of the flight zones and potential diseases, and farmers' estimates of crops saved using FloraFly compared to previous seasons.
The inventors say they've now surveyed more than 1,200 acres across five Northern Virginia farms, helping save 13,500 pounds of produce and reducing chemical inputs into local agricultural systems, calculating their results by multiplying the average crop yields per square foot as verified by farmers in areas where early intervention stopped the spread of infestation or disease.
With a tweaked design, a more agile four-rotor drone than the original six-rotor version, the boys hope to continue testing and build a fleet of their updated drones to survey more farms in the next growing season.
They're also hoping to maintain a flow of entrepreneurship grants, STEM awards, and international project awards to fund their work. (Their recent win at the 2025-2026 International Youth Environmental Challenge will help.)
Ultimately, the boys say, they want to democratize precision agriculture – a goal with regional resonance in Loudoun County.
"High-end agritech is currently locked behind multi-thousand-dollar industrial contracts that only corporate mega-farms can afford," they told Patch. "Small, diversified family farms operate on thin margins and feed local communities, yet they have the least access to cutting-edge tools"
The team continued, "We want FloraFly to be an open, scalable, and low-cost ecosystem that gives any regional farmer the autonomous intelligence they need to cut chemical inputs, prevent crop waste, and make local food supply chains resilient to climate variability."
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