UTRGV Brothers Win Zoho AI Hackathon With Crop Water Tool

Twin brothers Edgar and Eduardo Bello Gonzalez, students at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, won the first Zoho "From the Ground Up" AI Hackathon with Dos Ojos, an AI crop monitoring system for irrigation decisions, according to Small Business Trends, which interviewed the pair in an item published on October 13, 2026.

The system has three parts, Edgar Bello Gonzalez said: free Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, optional drone imagery and an SMS bot that farmers message to register a farm and mark their field area on a Google Maps link. Recommendations on where water is most needed are delivered by bilingual text message rather than through a dashboard or specialized software.

The brothers said the idea came from growing up in Mexico during a drought, when water was available only at certain hours and dying crops and livestock pushed local food prices higher. After moving to the Rio Grande Valley, about two hours from where they had lived, they saw similar dryness in a region with extensive agriculture.

Edgar is majoring in computer science with an electrical engineering minor and built the software; Eduardo, an electrical engineering major minoring in computer science, handled planning, the budget, presentation and outreach to farmers. They are working to turn the prototype into a usable tool.

This story was first reported by Small Business Trends.