>> 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. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin, with Jeff Frick, and we have just spent a really interesting educational day at the Fork to Farm event, Food IT. Jeff we've spoken with investors, ag-tech experts, folks in academia who are training the next generation of farmers, to Campbell Soup, who's been around since the late 1800s, are really focused on helping the agriculture and food industry combat the challenges of environmental sustainability, of climate change, of labor shortages, it's been a really, really intriguing day, where tech meets food and agriculture. >> Yeah and just a huge opportunity. One of the themes that kept coming up over and over again, is the average age of the farmers today. Heard 70 something, 60 something, whatever, they're getting old, so there's going to be a huge turnover in this industry, so both a challenge as well as an opportunity for the next generation of ag-people to make some of these changes, and change the way the industry works. The other thing that's really interesting that I found Lisa, is that there's really big social issues that are at play here. We talked about water, we talked about labor, that play into this whole thing, sustainability. And again, tying it back to their theme of its fork to farm, how much of that's now driven by the consumer and the industry, it's kind of a reaction to the consumer, which we see over and over and over in all the other shows that we go. The consumerization IT, driven by younger people's interactions with their phones, is setting an expectation of the way they want everything to work. And so, it sounds like the food industry is really at the cutting edge of this, still really early on, but as we saw in some of those market maps, and the innovation is rich, feels like we're really at the start of this thing. So even though this show has been around for a few years, they have the big show in Salinas next week, the Forbes show, that's still really early days of leveraging tech, innovation, to change the food industry. >> It is, and you brought up that the labor shortages, and that was echoed quite a bit today, for a number of reasons. One, the aging population of farmers as you mentioned. Two, also in California, the minimum wage going up, and that's not only going to be a problem Jeff for farmers, but it's actually now pervading into the retail space, where they're going to have to start depending on robotics to be able to create, or to reduce their cost, to provide even fast food. That was something that was quite interesting to me, I hadn't really quite thought about, from that channel perspective. >> Right, right. >> And then as you mentioned, on the tech enabled consumer side, I was talking with Jeff earlier, I kept thinking farm to fork, 'cause farm to table is so trendy now, right? There's a lot of apps. And you gave me this a-ha grasshopper look, and it was really because as consumers we've really demanded so much. We want transparency, we want to know exactly what's in things, and we want organic, and hormone-free, and we also want things delivered whenever, and wherever we want them. We think of the distribution model, has really become very decentralized, and a lot of that being driven by the consumer. On the farm side too, regarding the attrition, there's also a lot of antiquated, especially in the post-harvest supply chain, things that are still written down on paper, traceability is a huge challenge for them. And I think from some of the things we heard today, a lot of the farming, especially in California, they can't really quite see all the data that they have, but they are sitting on a lot of information, that not only could make their farms more efficient, but could also facilitate you think, even knowledge transfer to the next generation of farmers. Right, right. Yeah a lot of talk about kind of there wasn't a lot of data, now it's a data flood. So how do you use those data sources to be more intelligent in what you do? And I specifically asked some of the guests, you know, are kind of the classic big data players participating in this space, and she said, "Not really." They're all kind of holding off on the side waiting to get in. But these are big numbers, this is a big impact. The professor from St. Louis Episcopal talked about a billion dollars worth of strawberries that you got to get off the field, and if you don't have the labor to get it off, and the data to get the labor and to time it right, it's a billion dollars worth of strawberries, and these are big numbers. And the other thing that just fascinated me, is again, this power of the consumer. The Google guy who took basically what was a service just to feed employees and keep them around so they write more code, but using that as a platform to drive much more thoughtfulness and intelligence. And supply chain changes around food, and even called it food shot in reference to the moon shot. >> The moon shot, yes. >> Enabled better diets, shift diets, food transparency, reduced loss and waste, accelerate transformation to a circular food economy. So, and they said, I think he's been at it for 15 years or thereabout. So really an interesting kind of a twist, on what you would not expect from the food service people, you think of them just supplying food. >> Exactly. >> Not trying to drive cultural change. >> Exactly, and trying to scale, but they're using data from their own googlers, to help determine and evaluate what people are doing, what they want, preferences, making it more personal, and using data in that way to also then facilitate some of the upstream, you know from the supply perspective, making things, meeting those challenges that the consumers are demanding, but you said he's been at Google for five years, and when he first got the call being in hospitality for so long, he just thought, "Google, what do they want to talk to me for?" And how revolutionary they've been, and you can think of how much education can happen from Google Food alone. I was quite blown away by that. >> Yeah, the other kind of theme is unused resources. So, one of the food trucks that they had seaweed. Why seaweed? Because it takes no fresh water, it takes no fertilizer, and it's carbon negative. So not really about how does it taste, but some specific reasons to try to make seaweed a better food, a more satisfying food. Talked about kale, and really again what a great example of a, can't say it, Fork to Farm tradition, 'cause before kale was a throwaway, nobody grew kale, now suddenly everybody wants kale smoothies, and so there's nothing, plant became something of importance, driven by the consumer, not necessarily by the producers. So, very dynamic times. I think again, the trend we see over and over and over, finding the hollowing out of the middle. You know, you don't want to be just a generic provider in the middle, you better have massive scale, or you better be a real specialty provider. And then finally the ramifications of the Amazon purchase of Whole Foods, really validating, yes you want digital, yes you want data, yes you want to provide better customer service. But at the same time, you still need a physical presence, kind of validating the physical presence of the store like Whole Foods. So really a very dynamic activity going on in this space. >> And it'll be interesting to see what happens over the next five to 10 years, as farming generationally changes hands. And there is technology that's available today, right? We talked about big data, there's many, many sources of public data, whether it's satellite imagery, water data that can be utilized and then paired with private data that a farm has. Or using GPS devices on tractors and combines, robotics. You talked to the inventor of the Sally Salad machine, there's a lot of technology that might be, I don't know if I'd say ahead of its time, but I think from a farming perspective, there's a little bit of a gap there right now. So it'll be very interesting to see how farms evolve from a technology perspective. I love how the Forbes AgTech Summit, I think it's tomorrow and Thursday in Salinas Valley, what a great juxtaposition of Silicon Valley and a world hub of technology innovation, to Salinas, which is the salad bowl of the world. I think that is quite interesting, and some of the dynamics that they've seen, I think this was their fourth event tomorrow. >> Jeff: Fourth event, right, right. >> Really starting to get more farmers interested in understanding the potential that ag-tech can have on profitability, efficiencies, reducing waste, even things like discovering and preventing foodborne pathogens. >> Right, and robots, we need robots, we don't have enough labor. Michael Rose said there's going to be a shortage of hundreds of thousands of line cooks. Just regular, ordinary line cooks at restaurants, and that's really kind of one of the applications of the salad machine, because as you hit the button below that cook, you can hit the button to load that salad, while you run off and pull the rest of the entree meals together. So, again, it's really fun to see the consistent themes that we see over and over, that's computing cloud and data-driven decision making, applied to what's arguably one of the most important things going on, which is feeding us a lot of conversation about the world's population getting to 10 billion in the not too distant future, that have to be fed. And again, with the aging of the population, the traditional farmers, a real opportunity to do kind of a refresh with a bunch of people that have grown up with these things. So, really cool show, a great day, hope you had fun, I had fun. >> Oh, I had a great time, it was really educational. I think that you hit the nail on the head, there's a tremendous amount of opportunity. I think what the Mixing Bowl is doing, along with Better Foods, is really bringing the people that are creating food, and producing it together, and connecting them with the people that are creating technology. So, I think this is the tip of the iceberg head of lettuce, maybe? So, I am excited to see what happens over time, but not only was it a great event, but I'm now very hungry. >> Now you're very hungry, there's more food trucks outside. Alright Lisa, well thank you again for hosting. >> Thank you. >> Again, another great show. I think last time we were together was at the NAB. >> NAB. >> Talking about media entertainment, so the digitization, transformation continues, driven by all these huge macro-factors of cloud, big data, so the beat rolls on. >> It does. >> Alright, she's Lisa Martin, and I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCube. Thanks for watching, we've got a busy spring coming to an end. Had a little bit of a lull in the summer then we'll hit it hard again in the fall, so thanks for watching siliconangle.tv, youtube.com/siliconangle, and siliconangle.com for complete coverage of a lot of stories beyond just theCUBE. I'm Jeff Frick, signing off with Lisa Martin from Food IT, from Fork to Food, thanks for watching.

>> 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.