Naman Desai

Naman Desai attends high school in Redmond, Washington. 

I was part of the Gates Foundation Youth Ambassador Program for the past two years. Every year,we work to organize a Teen Action Fair that aims to raise awareness on a social issue affecting the youth today. I was on the marketing committee the past two years, and I was responsible for advertising the fair to local teens. Over 500 people came on the day of the fair and thousands saw the exhibit when it opened in February. released new articles on my blog and was interviewed by the local magazine, ParentMap, regarding the issues I was researching. https://www.parentmap.com/article/gates-foundation-discovery-center-youth-ambassador-sustainable-agriculture

I am continuing the project I worked on last year. I plan on raising awareness of the consequences of excess fertilizer usage. I plan to raise awareness via social media posts,research papers, articles, and critical essays. In fact, I have published a few articles on my blog (theridgeguy.com) already. I hope to expand that to other media like posters and social media posts. This issue is important because excess fertilizer use causes nutrient imbalances in plants that can potentially threaten food crops. Excess nutrients will also leach into local water bodies. Algae will feast on the nutrients, consume the dissolved oxygen in the lake, and kill off all the organisms in the ecosystem. A solution to this is to provide farmers with precision farming tools that use technology and data to inform resource allocation on farms. This will reduce waste and pollution. I envision this playing out via my research and campaign work reaching relevant people who can reduce the cost of precision farming technologies and increase access for farmers. I even built an NPK and soil moisture sensor prototype that displays sensor data on a cloud dashboard via over the air updates. I built this device to explore how these new technologies work so I could better understand them. Precision farming technologies could greatly reduce pollution.