>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Food IT: Fork to Farm. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hi, welcome back, I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE, we are at the Farm IT event. This is an incredible opportunity to talk with folks that are experts in agriculture, food and agriculture, academia, farmers, producers, those all across the food chain. The theme of this event is Fork to Farm, and I'm excited to be joined by my next two guests, we have Dan Sonke, the Director of Sustainable Agriculture from Campbell's Soup, welcome. >> Thank you. >> And you can't say this, but Dan has Campbell Soup tennis shoes on and they're awesome. And David Sypnieski, the Founder and CEO of Athena Intelligence, welcome gentlemen. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, good to be here. >> So this has been, before we went on we were kind of talking about kind of my thoughts on Ag-Tech, and this is a really interesting and unique opportunity for theCUBE, to really look at the influences of Big Data and Analytics, Cloud Computing, Open-source Software, Blockchain, and how this all can be very influential across the food chain and you know, from the event's theme perspective, it's really been a lot this morning, talking about the tech-enabled food consumer really driving a lot of this change, expectation-wise. But Dan, first question to you, knowing, growing up on Campbell's Soup as a kid, founded in 1869, how is Campbell's Soup taking action to implement not only support-sustainable agriculture, but also, what were the drivers? >> Well, we definitely see consumers driving interest in where the food comes from, where ingredients that go into Campbell's Soup come from. We, a few years ago, decided that we wanted to be a company that makes real food that matters for life's moments, so that's our mission, that's our purpose, and so we want to connect to consumers with the information that supports that claim, that the food is trustworthy, that it's authentic, and that it resonates with the emotional side of how it's consumed in families, and the moments that matter. >> And also probably from a branch perspective, this is a historic brand in the United States, and that's probably quite important to meet those needs. >> Absolutely, we want to we the most transparent food company, we want to be open and honest with our consumers, and satisfy their desire for real food. >> So talk to us about kind of the genesis of the sustainability in agriculture at Campbell, when did that start? And really, besides the consumers, maybe some on the customer side, who was really driving this initiative? >> Well, we drive it internally, so six years ago, we decided to venture into sustainable agriculture in a formal way. We did a stakeholder assessment, so we talked to customers, we talked to investors, we talked to farmers, suppliers, folks inside the company, outside the company, North America, Europe, Australia, and asked them a series of questions, and said where should we focus, what are the crops, what are the subject areas we should focus on in agriculture sustainability? And we came up with a focus on tomatoes and other vegetables that people think of when they think of Campbell's Soup, we're largely a vegetable nutrition, and whole-grain nutrition company, so we wanted to focus there. And we focused on water, fertilizer, greenhouse gases, soil and pesticides, so that was our focus area, and we really took a measure-to-manage approach, so intentionally going to farmers, starting with tomatoes, with a limited set of questions that capture a lot of information and would be information growers would have, so we asked them how much water did you apply to make the crop, how much fertilizer do you use, what was the irrigation system, what are some of the decision tools that you used to make informed decisions? And so we started collecting that data. We also started capturing the geographic locations of the fields, believing that the technology would come to enable us to put that together, and lo and behold, fast-forward five years, now we have five years of data. We've tracked some really great stuff that our farmers have done. For example, last year water use per pound of tomato grown, was down by 20% over our first year of tracking that data. >> Wow. >> Huge gains, and efficiency and, you know, especially since it's a California crop, that was in the period of a five-year drought, so very encouraging to see that growers can do that kind of thing, and very proud of our growers for doing that. >> Absolutely, and on the technology side, so we've got David here. Athena Intelligence, talk to us a little bit about the genesis of Athena Intelligence, and how your working in partnership with Campbell's Soup. >> Sure, so I've got a storied background in agricultural tech work with production, growers, ag-tech companies, processors like Campbell's and others. And several years ago I kind of realized the fact that while all of this technology is from Silicon Valley and around the world, it's starting to, kind of make it's way into agriculture. An assumption that everyone makes is that the data is ready to be used in some sort of technology. >> Right. >> Alright, so kind of the the running joke in the field is that, you know, that a lot of technology has built a lot of solutions that are desperately looking for a problem to solve. And the problem, while it sounds simple, it not so easy to put together. But the problem is that, as Campbell's Soup for example, was collecting all of that data, you know, the entire industry has never really been familiar with the structure of how do you actually use data in any kind of meaningful kind of data science or analytical way and so, just being able to compile it all from various different formats and sources was a burden, so while you had all this data, it actually couldn't be used at all. And so Athena Intelligence was about basically, me coming to the realization, and collaborating with Dan, and Campbell's has been a great partner of saying, you know, we're going to solve that one problem, the unglamourous, the unsexy, problem of building a piece of technology which can efficiently and automatically begin to clean up, and normalize, and standardized data sets from multiple different sources and-- >> And we're talking about like data from weather sources, sensors, satellite imagery-- >> Right, so it's a fusion of public and private data, so the public data, everything from satellite imagery to soil, to weather stations, river flows, 98 different attributes of the weather, and water-related data. And then of course all of the private data, both Campbell's internal processing data, and then all the data that they're collaborating with their suppliers so, it's a pretty broad assortment which comes from, I mean the formats are everything from a hand-written notebook, to a PDF, to Excel to-- >> Wow. >> It's all over the board. >> So this is really Big Data and Analytics, being able to bring and aggregate data from different sources, facilitate data discovery. >> We're making data efficient right now, because the problem is that it's so, it's such a laborious effort. You know, 90% of the time people are putting in, just trying to clean and organize it. >> Right. >> Leaving very little time to be able to analyze it, let alone make any decisions or collaborate on it. So we're addressing that 90% of the time that people spend on trying to put the stuff together in the first place. >> Okay so Dan, walk us through kind of a use-case example of how your implementing, or have implemented, Athena Intelligence software, and what some of the outcomes have been so far. >> Right, so the goal has been to take the quality data that comes in to our systems, and that is one area where we do use data historically quite a bit, we have tons of data on every load of tomatoes that comes into our processing plants. But then we're marrying that data to the publicly available weather, soil, water data, and the data that the growers report on sustainability practices. And the goal is to find the win, win, win, the win for the environment, the win for the farm profitability, and the win for Campbell's Soup quality, and sustainability drivers as well. And the example that we're currently pursuing is tomato solids, so that's an obscure term for most people, but it's a industry measurement of how much sugar is in the tomatoes basically. >> Okay. >> The solids of the tomatoes coming in, affect how they process into our ingredients, the higher solids, the easier they are for us to process, and the less energy it requires for us to do that. So it's a sustainability win as well. We already pay growers for higher solids. We know a few things that can generate higher solids on the farm, but we think there are more pieces of information that have been hiding in that Big Data set. So can we tease out what soils produce higher solids, or what irrigation practices drive higher solids, or whatever it is, so we're in the process right now. We've got a project going between our research innovation fund, Athena, and that's the target that we're going after this summer is to dig into five years of data, and find that win. >> Wow. So it sounds like Athena Intelligence has really enabled Campbell's Soup to become a data-driven company? >> Well, we certainly are a data-driven company, but this is extending the reach of the data outside the four walls of our factory-- >> And also into the farmer, so you're really enabling the farmers to embrace data, evaluate what they have. Have you seen any...? So one of the things we were talking about earlier today, or was being talked about was the labor shortages, as well as attrition. So you mentioned you know, things in ledgers and hard copy. Are you also seeing an influence maybe, that Campbell's having to your farmers, becoming much more, less paper-driven, and maybe more modern in terms of the way that they're collecting and storing data? >> Well, I can't say that we can take credit for that, but we certainly want to be one of the many voices at events such as this one, to be a beacon, calling the industry to solve this problem. David really mentioned it. The challenge is, growers don't have the resources to capture data easily. If they were you know, if that was their mindset, they'd probably be accountants and not farmers right? Farm they have, you know, they're in farming for all the attributes of a farm lifestyle, not a data-capture lifestyle. >> Right. >> So capturing that farm data, and making it easy for them to get the data into systems that they can then use, is one of my passions right? A lot of companies are out there saying, "Oh, we can create a platform that will help Campbell's "get information out of the farms." And I keep telling them, "No, if you create the system "that makes it easier for farmers to use their own data, "to get more efficient and more profitable, "they'll put the data in." >> Okay. >> That's not-- >> So you think that's really where the sweet spot is, and the next step is really-- >> And that's how we drive sustainability. >> Because if they, if the tools can help them with the data to make more informed decisions that's, that's what we want to get out of our sustainability programs, it's not just data for reports say, for Campbell's, it's how do we drive progress on the farm, and we do that by creating the systems that everybody can use more easily. >> Well, it's so neat to hear that a company that so many of us know and have grown up with, has evolved so much to be very focused, and have sustainability really, as a core, and it's also great to know that there are technologists out there that have that Ag-Tech experience, that are enabling companies to leverage the power of Big Data, so gentlemen, I want to thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing your insights with us, we wish you the best of luck, and look forward to seeing what happens in the next few years. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> My pleasure. And we want to thank you for watching theCUBE again, I'm Lisa Martin, and we are at the Farm IT event From Fork to Farm, or Food IT event. We will be back with some more great guests, so stick around. (techno music)