Kripa Varanasi had just started his first year as an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009 when he went to Washington, D.C., to give a talk at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. His academic focus was on the bottlenecks that occur between states of matter—where liquids and solids meet, for example—and he was studying how to make droplets stick to, or bounce off, solids in various applications. Varanasi had just come off a stint in industry, at GE, where he was inculcated in the entrepreneur’s habit of looking for problems to solve, so he asked the USDA representatives for their top gripe. They didn’t hesitate to answer: “Pesticide runoff is a big problem.”
Now, 13 years later, Varanasi and one of his since graduated Ph.D. students—Vishnu Jayaprakash—have launched AgZen, which uses additives developed in the lab to make more pesticide spray droplets stick to the plants they hit. In early lab tests and field trials, the additives replicated farmers' prior results but with up to 50% less pesticide, cutting costs and reducing pollution from runoff and wind-carried chemicals.
