>> Narrator: From the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley it's the Cube, covering Food IT: Fork to Farm brought to you by Western digital. >> Hi welcome back to the Cube. We are at the fourth annual Food IT: Fork to Farm event at the Computer History Museum. I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost Jeff Frick Very excited to to welcome our next guest, Paul Noglows, who is the executive producer of the Forbes AgTech Summit. Paul, welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you >> So we're in the heart of Silicon Valley right now, but you are the creator of the Forbes AgTech Summit, which happens tomorrow, June 28th and 29th in Salinas, the salad bowl of America. Talk to us about this event that you've created. What was the genesis of this, and why Salinas? >> We were doing a series at Forbes in 2014 called reinventing America, and we were going around cities mostly in the midwest, but we were mostly looking at industries that were really reinventing themselves and remaking themselves, so we focused on advanced manufacturing in Chicago, we focused on healthcare in Indianapolis, then we went up to Detroit and we focused on reinventing the workforce. So we did a series of five shows over 15 months. And the last one, we thought we were going to reinvent the farm, and we thought we were going to do it somewhere in the Midwest. But we got a proposal from the city of Salinas and they said, why don't you come out and see what we got here, and it's the salad bowl of the world, and I knew Monterey pretty well from having lived out here, and we used to take our kids down to the Monterey Aquarium, but I never really knew Salinas or the Salinas valley. So I got a tour from the former mayor, Dennis Donohue, and it was just we were blown away by how much was going on, and really, it's become the epicenter of AgTech innovation. We're just thrilled at Forbes that we were able to be part of that and to support it. And the summit has grown dramatically over the three years, and so we're really looking forward to a terrific show. >> Tell us about the growth that you've achieved in this summit. The opportunities, the types of people that are there, and what they are going to be able to see and discuss. >> Yeah, We started out with about 400 participants in the summer of 2015, we had 20 startups, but it's really mushroomed from there. This year, we're have 650 participants, we'll have 50 companies in the innovation showcase, we've expanded the field demos and the plant tours to a full day. About a good third of our audience are farmers, and that's really been the secret sauce for us. Is that we've priced the summit right. There's a lot of summits out there, and people are starting to get big numbers for an afternoon at the Marriot Marquee. Ours is really different, we've kept the rate low enough so that farmers can participate, and we love to have everyone outside. We do it all under giant white tent right out in front of the Taylor building on main street in Salinas, and we also have people out at the local processing plants and the local fields. We go out to Hartnell's Alisal campus and we use the USDA test field. >> Its interesting because Salinas has been at the forefront of Ag Innovation a long time ago. It was one of the first refrigerated rail cars to try to get fresh lettuce for salad to Chicago. I remember reading about that numerous times, and the first couple didn't work that well. >> Well it's really amazing. It's been such a privilege to deal with folks Bruce Taylor. It was Bruce's father and grandfather who really were the pioneers of iceburg lettuce. The more you get into it, you know, I've gotten really passionate about it and the history and everything else. You see the continuation today, and with the developments. And, even if it's a Taylor farm putting a startup's robotics, putting them in their processing plants. This is really the cutting edge of AgTech innovation. >> So I'm curious, we cover a lot of big tech events, usually more on the infrastructure side, this is really on the application side. So as you look at cloud, and edge computing, and big data, and mobile, and some of these big trends. What if you can just highlight some of the ones that really jump out to you that have enabled some of these innovations, autonomous vehicles obviously drones, we're seeing so much of it, but now they're putting it to work. >> Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, there's so much going on. We look in field robotics, we look at precision automation, precision agriculture, and the use of big data, and the ability to harness that and to really apply it, it's changed a lot of things. It's changed the way we can grow. It's also changing consumer's tastes in what consumers want. And that's a lot of what we're talking about here today. So it really has been revolutionary. I think we need the industry, we need to industry to really agriculture itself to get really get together. I think sometimes there still this is looked at as competitive advantage, so what I, we, find interesting is are we going to move beyond competitive advantage and what's good for your plant or your farm. Is there going a collective effort to really start applying this across the agricultural system. >> What are the interesting things that they talked about this morning in the general session was and the theme of the event. We're so used to farm to table, farm to fork, and I looked at that and fork to farm? The consumer is so empowered, very demanding. Right, we want cage free, we want organic, we want hormone free, we want, we've changed the distribution model. How are, but also there's this paradox of the consumer not wanting factory farms. How are farmers, you said quite a bit of the attendees are farmers, how are they embracing this consumer demand with technologies like big data, cloud computing, block chain? >> Well I think it's really the key. It's that you have different farmers and different processors. There's a wide spectrum in terms of adoption and in terms of innovation. But they are putting it to work, and that's why there's so much interest in the startups, and there's so much interest in how can we do this more efficiently, how can we do this better. I think it used to be that you basically needed to have a crisis, like the ecoli crisis, for things to really change in the industry. But hopefully, we've moved beyond that. In that it's not going to take a crisis for folks to really start embracing these new technologies. >> So then in the other trend that has come up in a number of times in doing some background in this show is that there's not only kind of the very organic, cage free specialty demands in the customer. On the other hand, the population is growing, and we got to feed 10 billion people, I think number is projected by 2050. There's no new dirt being created last time I checked, except in Hawaii. How are the farmers embracing that challenge specifically cause, it's kind of this bipolar thing, one you want to increase specialization, on the other hand you got to get yields way way up at massive scale. >> Well, and that's it, and it's really looking at how do you increase yield. This is a lot of the interest. This is a lot of the interest in genetics and everything else and looking at the real science of growing. But it's also interesting in this is a little bit more further afield, but I was talking to Bruce Taylor even about kale. You know 10 years ago kale was considered a throwaway crop. >> Right >> Paul: It wasn't even harvested. And now you look at the impact kale is having on the American diet and you know you have a crop that represented really nothing probably as recently as five years ago. >> Jeff: Right >> Now it's an important crop. So there's all sorts of innovation, all sorts of different ways of looking at things, but I do think for the most part that's the reason we have those things. We've always been adamant that we don't want to get people together to talk about 2050, we're not futurist. We're looking at near term solutions to current problems. So what we're really interested in, you know, what is the farm of 2020 look, not the farm of 2050. >> Jeff: Right, right >> As we look at California that's just come out of this severe drought, the event being hosted in the salad bowl of the, really, the world, what are some of the challenges that are really common across farms, across the heartland of America? Water, planting inefficiencies, harvesting or supply chains, are you seeing a lot of commonalities? >> There are a lot of commonalities. I think there's a mistake. We actually have a conversation tomorrow. I kind of feel like the assumption is all the water problems are over, and the water problems are not over. They maybe over for a short period of time, but I am fully convinced that this is going to be. Two years ago this was the topic du jour at our conference. I'd say this year probably the major topic is labor. And labor, you see, having tremendous impact. You have, across the country. And so, you have the issues of immigration, you've got issues of minimum wage, that certain farms are saying we don't know how we are going to do this. >> Lisa: Right >> We don't know how to make this work. But the major pressures, things like that water, labor, those haven't gone away, and those haven't been solved. But that's why we're all getting together. That's why we're here today, and that's why we're going to be down in Salinas Wednesday and Thursday. >> And on the labor front, it's that you've talked about the Californian minimum wage is going up quite considerably. But it's also things like an aging farming population, and there's, you can see the value there from a big data perspective to be able to capture, to facilitate some automation and drive the next generation of >> Paul: Well >> Lisa: the farmers. >> And one of the ways we're going to close our conference on Thursday afternoon is I'm going to moderate a discussion on farmers of the future. Because we've all heard it, we've all heard it time and time again. The average of the American farmer, I think it's pushing 70 years old, and there's no succession planning and that no body gets into this business unless they're basically born into it or forced into it in some way, and what we're finding is that it's not really true. We're putting up four young farmers, who are really making a difference, and who are applying innovation to be able to build their farms. And so, we think that it's actually more hopeful, and more interesting than may at first blush. So yeah, we do think there is a future for farming, and we're determined to explore it to its fullest. >> That's fantastic. Aught to be a fly on the wall on that conversation. Well Paul, thank you so much for joining us on the Cube, and we wish you the best of luck in your third annual Forbes AgTech Summit in the salad bowl. If you haven't been to Salinas, as Paul said, it's worth a drive down there, it's incredible. Roll down the window, take a nice breath in, and it's a beautiful place. And again, we wish you the best of luck at that summit, and we look forward to hearing about some of the great things that come out of that. >> Paul: Thank you >> And we want to thank you at the Cube at the Food IT: Fork to Farm event, I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost Jeff Frick. Stick around, we're going to be right back.