(light upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's day two live coverage of VMware Explore 2022 from Moscone Center in San Francisco. Lisa Martin here as your host with Dave Nicholson. We've got a couple of guests here and we have some props on set. Get a load of this Nature Fresh Farms produce. Keith Bradley joins us, the VP of IT from Nature Fresh Farms, and Alison Biers is back, as well, director of marketing at Edge Solutions for Dell. Guys, welcome back to the program and thanks for bringin' some food. >> Well, thank you, yeah. >> Thank you so much. >> So, Keith, talk to us a little bit about technology from Nature Fresh Farm's perspective. How do we look at this farming organization as a tech company? >> As technical, we're something that measures everything we grow. So, we're 200 acres of greenhouse, spanning probably about 3 or 400 acres of land. Everything's entirely environmentally controlled. So, the peppers that we have in front of you, the tomatoes, they're all grown and controlled from everything they get from light to moisture to irrigation and nutrients. So, we do all that. >> So, should I be able to taste the Dell goodness in these cucumbers, for example? >> I'd like to say Nature Fresh slash Dell good. >> Connect the dots for us. So, let's go through that sort of mental exercise of how are these end products for consumers better because of what you're doing in IT? >> So, one of the things that we've been able to do, and one of the transformations we made is we are now able to run our ETLs. So, analyze the data realtime at the Edge. So, making decisions which used to be only once a day based on analytics to now multiple times a day. Our ETLs used to take 8 to 10 hours to run. Now they run- >> So, extraction, transformation and load. >> Yep, yep. >> Okay. So, we consider it a party foul if you use a TLA and you don't find it the first time. >> Okay. >> But you get a pass 'cause you're an actual and real person. >> I'll give you that one. >> I already had a claim laid on that. I'm sorry, so continue. >> Yeah, yeah. So, it allowed now the growers to make multiple decisions and then you start adding the next layer. As we expanded our technology base, we started introducing AI into it. So now, AI is even starting to make decisions before the grower even knows to make them based on historical data. So, it's allowed us to become more proactive in protecting the health and longevity and even taste of that plant and the product coming out to you. >> That's awesome. Alison, talk to us about from Dell's perspective how is it helping Nature Fresh to simplify the Edge which there's a lot of complexity there? You talked about the size of the organization but how do you help simplify it? >> I think Nature Fresh had a lot of common problems that we see customers have. So, they had some really interesting ambitions to improve their produce and do it in a GMO free way and really bring a quality product to their customer. But yet, they were each solving their problems on their individual farms in different ways. And so, one of the ways that we were able to help was to consolidate a lot of those silos as they were expanding the scope and scale of what they really wanted to do from a technology perspective. And then being able to do that in a secure way that's delivering the insights they need when they need them right there at the Edge is really critical. >> I think it's wonderful that we have the actual stuff here. Because we often talk in these abstract terms about outcomes. There's your outcome right there. >> Yeah. >> Right. >> But talk about this growing in the soil somewhere. You have growers. It's not an abstraction. These are actual actual people. Where does the technology organism interface occur here? You have organically grown crops. Where's that interface? Where's the first technology involved in this process? Literally physically. >> Physically. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is there a shack with a server in it somewhere? >> So, we actually have, we have a core data center at the center of Nature Fresh set up basically where everything ends up. We have our Edge. So, we have computers, we're at the Edge analyzing stuff. But if you want to go right back to the grassroots of where it actually is, is it's right at, not dirt, but a ground up coconut husk. That is what the plants are grown in. And we analyze the data right there, 'cause that is our first Edge. And people think that's static for us. The Edge isn't static. 'Cause the Edge now moves. We have a plant that grows. Then we pick it. And then we have to store it and then we have to ship it. So, our Edge actually does move from area to area to area. So, statically one thing isn't the same all the time. It's a hard thing to say how it all starts but it's just a combination of everything from natural gas to everything. >> Okay, then are those, 'cause we think of things in terms of like internet of things and these sensors. >> Oh yeah. >> Things are being gathered. So, you've got stuff happily growing in husks and then being picked. What's the next step there? Where is that aggregated? Where does that go? Is that all going straight back to your data center or are there sort of intermediate steps in the process? >> So, what we do is we actually store everything at the Edge, and we do daily processes right there. And then it aggregates that data and it drops it down from a large number to a smaller number to go to the core. >> Got it. >> And then that way, at the core, it does the long term analysis. 'Cause again, a lot of the data that we collect, we don't need to keep. A lot of it is the temperature was X, the temperature was X, the temperature, we don't need that. So, it aggregates it all down. So, that way the information coming to the core doesn't overwhelm it. Because we do store enough information. And to give you an idea of how our 1.8 million plants are living and breathing. We actually have estimated 1.8 million plants throughout our 200 acres. >> At any moment. >> Yeah. >> That's how many plants they're tracking. And so, that realtime information is helping to make sure that they water the plants precisely with the amount that they need, that they're fertilizing them. And you were telling me about how the life of a plant, you're really maintaining that plant over the life of 12 months. So, if you make a mistake at any point along the line, then you're dealing with that in terms of their yield throughout the life of the plant. But you aggregate a lot of that data right there on site so that you're not having to send so much back to the cloud or to the core. And you do that a lot with VxRail as well as other technology you have on site. Right? >> Yeah. Our VxRail is the center of the core of how we process things. It allowed us to even expand, not even just for compute but GPUs for our AIs to do it. So, it's what we did. And it allowed us to mold how we do things. >> Alison, question for you, this sounds like a dynamic Edge the way that you described it, Keith, and you described it so eloquently. How does the partnership that Dell has with Nature Fresh, how is Dell enabling and accelerating and advancing its Edge solutions based on what you're seeing here and this need for realtime data analytics. >> Well, we spend a lot of time with customers like Keith and also across all kinds of other industries. And what we see is that they have a really common set of problems. They're all trying to derive realtime data right then and there so that they can make business decisions that impact their profitability and their competitiveness and all of their customers experience their product quality. And what we see a lot of times is that they have a common set of concerns around security. How to manage all of the hardware that they're implementing. And at the same time, they really want to be an enabler for the business outcome. So, people have creative ideas and they come to IT hoping for support in that journey. If you're managing everything as a snowflake, it becomes really hard and untenable. So, I think one of the things that we have as our mission is to help customers simplify their Edge so that they can be the enabler that's helping the business to transform and modernize. One of the things I really admire about Nature Fresh Farms is that they decided it from a full organization perspective. So, everybody from the operational technologists to the IT to the business decision makers and leaders at the company, they all decided to modernize together. And so, I think from a partnership perspective, too, that's one of the areas that we try to work with our customers on is really talking about total transformation and modernization. >> So, it sounds like, Keith, there was an appetite there as Alison was saying for a digital transformation and IT transformation. Talk to me a little bit about from a historical perspective, how old Nature Fresh is and how did you get the team on board sounds so eloquent. How did you get the team on board to go, "This is what we need to do and technology needs to fuel our business because it's going to impact the end user, consumer of our fabulous English cucumbers." >> So, it's actually really neat. Our owner, Pete Quiring, when he first started out he really wanted to embrace technology. And this is going back right to 2000. 2000 is when we first had our first planting. And he was actually a builder by nature. He actually was a builder and fabricator and he built greenhouses for other companies. But he said they're getting a little bigger and it's the labor amount, and the number of growers he needed for a range was getting exponentially higher. So, he was one of the first ones that said, "I'm going to put a computer right in the middle and control this 16 acre range." >> It's a pretty visionary view when you really think about it. He's trying to operate his farm. >> Yeah. >> Right? >> From one single computer. >> Operationalize it. It's really cool. >> So, it was neat concept and it was actually very much not a normal concept then. You go back to 2000, people weren't talking about internet of things. They didn't talk about automation. It wasn't there. And he basically said, this is the way to go. And unfortunately, he thought, "I'll sell it to somebody. I'll grow it, I'll put a product in for a year and I'll sell it." And then guess what happened? He didn't sell it. He says, "Ah, it's not big enough. I'll build another phase two." And then his comment to me was after he built the fourth phase, he says, "I guess I'm in the pepper and cucumber business now." And that's what he is just grown. But he said it was a great relationship we had and it's a great concept. And it even goes back, and I know we talked about before, is the computer allowed one senior grower to control large number of acreages. Where before, you'd need multiple growers that know exactly what to do, 'cause they'd have to manually change all these things. Now, from a single computer they can see everything that's going on in the entire range. >> You mentioned temperature and water. And this is kind of out of the blue question, but how have global circumstances and increases in the cost of fertilizer affected you? Or is that fertilizer that's not the type that you use in your operation? You have any insight into that. >> Yeah, everything has, the global change in cost has changed everybody. I don't think there's anybody that's exempt from it. The only thing that we've been able to do is we're able to control it. We don't need to rely on, I guess you can say, rely on the weather to help us do things. We can control how much is. And we recycle all of our water. So, what the plant doesn't absorb today for nutrients, we'll put it back in the system, sterilize- >> Wait, when you say 200 acres, it's all enclosed? >> Yep, 200 acres. >> 200 acres of greenhouse. >> Yep, at 200 acres of greenhouse entirely enclosed. >> Okay, okay. >> There is not a single portion of our greenhouse that's actually gets exposed to the outside. And if you ever see a picture of a greenhouse and you see one of these lovely plants here wet, that's not true. That's just a nice to make it look better. >> Spray it for the photo. >> Yeah, yeah. They spray it for the photo. But actually everything is dry. That water goes directly to the roots and we monitor how much we put in and how much comes out. And then we recycle it. We even get so much recycling, we run natural gas generators to heat the water to heat the greenhouse. We take the burn-off of natural gas, the CO2, and funnel that into the greenhouse to give it natural stimulant. >> So, this is starting to remind me of "The Martian", if you read the book or if you seen the movie. >> Oh yeah. >> But planting the potatoes inside the hab, in the habitat. >> Yeah, and you cut 'em in half and the little ones grow with that next ones. But yep, we recycle everything that we do. And that's what we do. >> That's amazing. >> And all that information at their fingertips. Really, I think what technology is enabling you all to do is focus on what you all are good at, which is focusing on your farming operation and not necessarily the technology. So, one of the places I think we deliver some value is in validating a lot of the solutions so that customers don't have to figure that all out themselves. >> Yeah, 'cause I'm not a security expert. I don't always understand the true depth of security, but that's where that relationship is. We need this and we need that. And we need a secure way to let those communicate. And we can hand that off to the experts at Dell and let us do what we do best. >> What have been some of the changes? In the last couple of years, we've seen the security elevate skyrocket to a board level conversation. Ransomware is a when, not if, we get attacked. How does Dell help you from a security perspective ensure that what you're able to do ultimately gets these products to market in a secure fashion so that all that data that you're generating isn't exposed? >> So, like I said, I agree 100%. It's not matter of if it's going to happen, it's when it's going to happen. So, one of the things that we've actually done is we started to use Dell solution, the PowerProtect Data Manager to back up our solutions on the VxRail. And it actually did twofold for us. It allowed us to do a lot of database manipulation from restores and stuff like that. But we're now actually even investing in the cyber recovery vault that gives us that protection. And it allows us to now look at how long will it take us to get back up. And we're doing some tests right now and the last test we did is we're able to get back up going as a company from a full attack in about an hour. >> Wow. >> We've actually done a few simulations now. So, we are able to recover what our core needs are within an hour. >> Which is a very different metric than simply saying, "Oh, the data's available." >> Yeah. >> No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You get zero credit for that. We need our operations to be back up and running. >> Even that hour is stressful to our growers. >> Sure. >> It's a variable within a variable because if you go in the summer when it's super hot, they'll be very stressed out within an hour. And then you got nice calm weather day, it's not as bad. But the weather can change in how they have to close the vents. And you're not just closing one vent, you're closing 32, 64, 100 acres of vents. And you're changing irrigation cycle. You need that automation to do it for you. >> How do you let people eat these things after all the care that goes into it? I'm going to feel mildly guilty for just about a second and a half before I sink my teeth into the cucumber. >> Oh, but that's the joy of it. That's one of the things that I love. >> This is serious. You're proud of this, aren't you? >> Oh yeah. You know what? There's not single person at Nature Fresh that isn't proud of what we do each day. We enjoy what we do and it's a culture that makes us strive to do better every day. It's just a great feeling to be there every day and to just enjoy what you're doing. >> And see, it's real. It's real. Isn't it great? Isn't it great to be a part of? My background's in economics. I think of these things in terms of driving efficiency. And this is just a beautiful thing. When you control those variables, you leverage the technology and what's the end result? You're essentially uplifting everything in the world. >> Yeah, so true. >> Not to get philosophical on ya. >> Right, and feeding the world, especially during the last couple of years, that access. One of the things we learned in the pandemic, one of many, is access to realtime data isn't a nice to have anymore, it's essential. >> Yeah. >> So true. >> And so, the story that you're telling here, the impact to the growers, enabling them to focus what you were saying, Alison, on what they do best, Dell Technologies, VxRail enabling Nature Fresh to focus on what it does best, ultimately delivering food to people during the last couple of years was huge. >> Yeah, and allowing even at a reduced labor number for us to keep growing and doing things by automation. We still need labor in the greenhouse to pick, prune and do stuff like that. But again, we're looking into technologies to help offset that. But again, it was one of those things that we just had to be efficient at everything we do. And we drove that through everything we have. >> Well, and you guys haven't stopped. Right? >> Yeah. >> You're continuing to figure out, he was just telling me a little bit about what their next step is. So, just getting more and more accurate, more intelligence as they grow. So, it's the possibilities, that's what's exciting to me about Edge. I think this example is great, 'cause it's so relatable. Everybody can understand what the Edge is in this context. And it's really driven by the fact that you can put compute into so many different places now. It's more though a matter about how do you gather it? How do you do it in a way where you can actually understand and glean information and insights from it? And that, I think, is what you all are really focused on. >> Yeah, yeah, information is key. >> It is key. What's next from Dell's perspective for Edge computing technologies? what are some of the things you guys got cooking? >> Yeah, we're going to try to help customers to continue to simplify their Edge. So, to deliver those insights that they need where they need them, to do it in a really secure way. I know we talked about security but to do it in really a zero trust fashion. And to help customers to do it also in a zero IT fashion. Because in this example, it's the growers that are out there in the fields, or in your greenhouse in this sense, helping people that aren't necessarily IT specialists to be able to get all the benefits from the technology. >> So, do you think that VxRail technology could be used to optimize say the production of olive oil? I'm looking here and we have the makings of a pretty good salad. >> Yeah, you do. >> There you go. >> It obviously doesn't just apply to food production. >> Yeah, it really goes across the board. Whether we're talking about manufacturing or retail or energy, putting technology right there at the point of data creation and being able to figure out how to manage that inflow of data, be able to figure out which portion of the data is really valuable, and then driving decisions and being able to understand and intelligently make decisions for your business based on that data is really important. >> Keith, what's next? Give us, as we wrap out this segment here, what's next from a technology perspective? You mentioned a couple things you're looking into. >> Yeah, so I think automation is really going to change the way we do things. And automation within the greenhouse is truly just becoming a reality. It's funny we go back and we say, can we do this stuff? And now it's like, oh, even three years ago, I don't think we were quite ready for it, but now it's right there. So, I see us doing a lot more work with vendors like Dell and to do automatic picking, automatic scouting, all that stuff that we do by hand, do it in an automated fashion. >> And at scale, right? >> Yeah. >> That's the important part. I think when you're managing a snowflake, you can only do it to some level, and to be able to automate it and to be able to break down those silos, you're going to be able to apply it to so many parts of your business. >> Yeah, wide applicability. Guys, thank you so much for joining us, sharing the Nature Fresh, Dell story, bringing us actual product. This is so exciting. We congratulate you on how you're leveraging technology in a really innovative way. And we look forward to hearing what's next. Maybe we'll see you at Dell Technologies World next year. >> Sounds great. >> Sounds great. >> Thank you so much. >> All right, our pleasure, guys. >> Thank you. >> For our guests and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer 2022. Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. So, stick around. (light upbeat music)

thecube presents dell technologies world brought to you by dell good afternoon everyone welcome back to thecube's third day of coverage live from the show floor at dell technologies world 2022 lisa martin here with dave vellante we've been having lots of great conversations the last day and a half one of the things we love to do is really hear from the voice of dell's customers and we're going to do that next please welcome jonathan suckler the senior director of product marketing for dell and keith bradley the vp of i.t at nature fresh farms guys welcome hey great to be here thank you great thank you for letting us be here of course thanks for joining us so jonathan we're going to start with you we've been hearing a lot about we've been talking about ai for decades we've been hearing a lot about ai at the show it's it's so it's pervasive right it's in our refrigerators and our thermostats and our cars and that hockey puck thing that's in the kitchen that plays music when you're cooking right what's going on what is do you think from dell's perspective is fueling the adoption of ai now you know there's it i think that there's this huge interest in ai right now and you and you you're definitely pointed out a lot of the great success stories around ai but the the real benefit of is that you know with with with artificial intelligence applied to a lot of business problems you can solve them in ways that are that are much quicker than you would expect you know and you can solve them in ways you wouldn't have expected uh uh you know then than than you do what's really surprising though is as a as many as many people are interested in in using it and and all of the benefits that come from it though is that we really don't see the adoption being as quick as we would like to right i mean i want to say that like 80 percent of companies out there want to use ai they're testing ai you know they're they're they're planning uh projects around ai applications but when you ask them what's in production it really is still it's an innovator's game like you know companies like like nature fresh farms with uh what they're doing is truly at the tip of the spear what are some of the challenges jonathan that you're seeing from an adoption perspective of 80 say we want to actually be able to leverage this emerging technology in production the challenges are i think the pers it's a perceived challenge issue right i think there's like three big issues that people perceive as being uh barriers to adoption um the first one is pretty obvious it's cost right they they see artificial intelligence you they hear about all of the uh you know specialized hardware and and the software and the new and the people and the talent you've got to acquire to uh as being a barrier to that and they don't see the benefit or they they balance that against the benefit i think there's an issue also with uh complexity right because at the same time that you know you're building these these infrastructures around what you need to do for an artificial intelligence-enabled application there's this expectation that it needs to be separate and different and special and that becomes an issue from a management perspective right uh and i think finally uh it's uh it's change right i mean you you're you're bringing in new talent new new skill sets you're bringing in new technology and i think a lot of companies still today you know look at that as being like well what if if i do this am i really going to see the benefit if i am i stuck going down a path that i that i'm going to change later on and i think that's really the issue uh you know those but they're all perceived issues they're they're in in reality they're really not that true i mean keith has this done that nature fresh farms has done some incredible stuff right with with ai in an area that i i would never have guessed being a ripe for that kind of innovation you know so lisa keith knows that i love you know fresh tomatoes i live in the northeast where it's cold six months a year so we plant our tomatoes at memorial day weekend yeah right and then maybe you're lucky if you get tomatoes late august september and then you're done however you and i met a couple years ago you sent me all these vegetables i think i was popping the tomatoes like candy and then i interviewed you you were live in the giant greenhouse and it's just amazing what you guys have going to jonathan's point you're using ai to really create you know sustainable continuing flow of awesome vegetables tell us more about nature fresh so at nature fresh farms we're a 200 acre greenhouse just shy of 200 acres growing bell peppers and tomatoes and one of the biggest use cases for us in our ai is everything we do we need to be proactive so we need that ai to not be reactive to climate change to what happens to the weather to be proactive so it changes before the plant reacts because every time the plant will doesn't do as great we've lost production from it so we're always using our ai to help increase the yield per square meter inside of our greenhouses so everything from the growth the length the weight of the plant we monitor everything we want to know every aspect of that plant's life it's almost like doing an ekg on a plant 24 by 7 and wanting to know everything out of it how old is is the company nature fresh farms started in 1999 so we're just hitting 23 years now so we started off as a 16 acre little greenhouse our owner kind of got into it saying i think this is going to be new and he was one of the first ones to say i want to be all computers i want to do it culturally this is this was not an upsell or a hard sell for you from the vp of i.t perspective no no he's always been one saying that technology will change the greenhouse industry and that by adding technology the expertise is in the growers and letting technology help them do more because when we first started in the greenhouse industry you'd need a grower for every range so every 16 acre range would need a very senior grower now we have one grower that does 64 or almost 100 acres of greenhouse he'll have junior growers but he's able to do so much more so where do you specifically apply the ai can you talk about that uh so we talk specifically we apply the ai in almost all areas anything from picking the plant to the climate of the plant we'll do all those areas even on the packing line we actually have uh one robot well not a robot story a machine that looks at a box of tomatoes and basically tells us which one doesn't match the proper red because how you see red how you guys see red is slightly different so it'll tell us that this red tomato doesn't match so change out the right one so when it goes down the line into the consumers they're all exactly the same so it looks unified it looks beautiful like that how about that you're sending out red tomatoes yeah yeah that's what we do now what is dell's role in all this so dell's role has helped us grow what we do we started off with power scale and vxrail and stuff like that so everything's hosted on that and they have been a great partner at finding that solution to them i've been able to go to them and say hey i'm running into a storage problem i'm running into a compute problem they've been able to find a validated solution for us to use and to put out there and help us grow and then the next part that was really great that we've really now done is it's scalable as we're growing we've been able to community add more compute and more storage but not have to take things down to do it and that's what we really wanted to do yeah no i i think and i think what you're talking about there is really the one of the big issues that i was talking about earlier which is around complexity and cost right you know one of the answers to doing artificial intelligence in the enterprise is making sure that you can maintain and have an infrastructure that scales that's part of everything else and and to do that you've got to virtualize it and you know with power uh with a dell vxrail and power scale which it's all running vmware uh with with the uh with the containers and the vms on top of that actually managing you know and running those applications it takes a lot of the complexity of of worrying about where you're going to how you're going to manage that infrastructure and who's going to do it who's going to back it up how are you going to how you're going to you know keep costs down so it really really helps i think yeah yep and we just love it because we're able to take that solution make it better and make it do more and more every day and it's it's allowed our growers to see exponential time where they did it years ago it used to be overnight to get results sometimes from our system doing it now we're seeing it in real time and that's where i it really got to that point now where we're being reactive proactive to the to the plant the weather to stuff we know exactly what needs to happen before happens and that makes the plant grow more and that's what we're always aiming to do you know if you don't mind one of the things that i you were telling me about i think is really fascinating so is this idea that you know you need to have a data scientist you need a whole new staff to manage these applications these these technologies but you were talking about your growers are actually yeah they're actually data scientists that way right that's what we like to call them we call them grower scientists right now green sciences data scientists yeah because they've researched this data they know what the plant does and it's it's been a neat transition we talked about that how they went from being out in the greenhouse so much to being in front of the computer now but now with the help of ai they're more able to get back out into the greenhouse to now watch the plants see what's going on and be a part of the growth again and they said it's been great but they're the ones that are looking at these numbers every day every second if it's not remotely from home it's remote on the greenhouse they're launching everything because yeah think about they're watching 64 acres of land and making sure that does everything it needs to do so lisa this is a really good example of sort of distributed data at work right about this whole notion of data mesh where you have domain experts actually own the data you know they know they can bring context to the data it's not somebody who's just oh it's just data i don't really know what to do with it it's somebody who actually knows what it what it means that to me is a future use case that's going to explode yep it's like me i i look at their data and they always tease me because i'll look at it and i'll go yeah i have no idea but it's giving you numbers so are they right or not and it's a it's always a joke in the in the plant that i like ah you don't got question marks so it's working and then i'll go to them and say is this right and then they'll say yep we're on we're getting what we need i love the idea that you know we've we've heard of this term citizens citizen scientists or citizen data scientists and you have a grower data scientist yeah and i think that eliminates you talk again those problems like or challenges i mentioned earlier that kind of eliminates the complexity issue you know the uncertainty issue the fear of change when you've got your own uh teams who are who know what they need to do and they have the data to do it it just changes the game right yeah and the other two we found is i've always believed in it myself if you love what you do yeah you commit so much more to it and our growers they love what they do so their passion just exudes into the data and then it comes right back into the product well the technology is an enabler of their passion really i'm curious keith how the obviously the events of the last two years have been quite challenging how has ai been a facilitator of what seems like a competitive differentiation for your company uh it actually really accelerated it because we really had to invest in it that's when we started the the big journey to the vx rail the power protect data management we really had to invest in and then we heavily invested in the ai we've always had some lingerie in the background and it's always been there and we've been using it for years and years now but it really brought it right to the forefront though we have to do this better and we had to really push everything and as we grew it became more and more apparent that we were taking that road that investment was paying off for us now yeah how do i buy ai from you so you know it's interesting like i said we want to make it easy for for customers to implement an ai solution at dell and it's not so much that you go out and you buy an ai right or something like that what you're doing is is you're you're making your infrastructure ready for the applications that you need to run right and so at dell we have this uh these predefined uh architectures that we call validated designs they're validated uh to work in you know in a co in any a common environment we take the you know we take the guesswork out of uh how to put these systems together uh and in the case of artificial intelligence you know we we validate with our partners like uh uh vmware and like nvidia to make sure that the technologies work together so that they fit into the existing infrastructure they already have and uh you know in a way it's i think of it as virtualized ai but i think even more importantly it's it's ai for for any company it's not not for the not for the special scientists and you know not for the not for the uh the researcher at the university it's it's for you know it's for nature fresh farms with vxrail it's software defined you're able to bring in a gpu you've got the flexibility to do that for example yeah whereas with the traditional you know the old days you wouldn't be able to do that you'd be you'd have a lot of time on your hands and a lot of compute power you spent a lot of money doing what you need to do yeah oh yeah we'd be spending all the time working at it growing it and doing more and it just made our life easier not to manage the life the managed life cycle of the ai systems that we have is so much easier now because it's all predefined it's all it's all ready to go upgrade process all that is built into it yeah so life cycle is much easier from the i.t side so keith talk to talk to those folks in the audience who might have those those perceived challenges or limitations that jonathan was talking about because you're making it sound like this has been such an enabler of a business that's 23 years old we're taking growers who are experts at growing and they're playing and loving playing with data and ai how do you how do you advise folks to really eliminate some of those preconceived challenges that are out there i would say you have to sit there and just dive in you have to actually start to do it but you have to think about not where you the first two steps say where we want to be five steps from now and then say talk to a partner like dell with us and say this is where we want to get to this is and then figure out a way how to get there and committing to that path you can't get frustrated the first few times ai is very flustering sometimes the first few pass don't work and just saying going back to the drawing board each time we'll do it we've had a couple experiments where it didn't work and we didn't get the results we wanted and we had to just say let's change our thought process and how do we optimize this ai and then all of a sudden we started getting the right results but that it's it's like uh falling over the first time you fall over as a child it's gonna hurt but each time he gets a little less each time failure is progress yeah that's right that's right fail fast yeah failure can be a good f word yeah if you but you have to be open-minded yep oh yes every minute every minute you have to be open-minded and you have to you have to think outside the box too and that's the biggest part of things it's just not accepting things and just saying we have to do it but you have to have the culture that will embrace that and it sounds like the growers these are people that are expert and growing how it sounds like it wasn't an uphill battle to get them to come on board and become these citizen growers data scientists well you know it was funny because with the technology it kind of gave them that work-life balance that they didn't have before their life was inside the greenhouse because the plants grow 24 by 7. so now all of a sudden they just kept growing they could they could go home they kept doing their thing they could go home at five o'clock and because of the vdi solutions and stuff like that and the ai that's helping them grow they can kind of turn off and instead of having to come in sunday morning and that the the one joke we used to have is that on sundays if you're in church and there's clouds had come rolling out all the growers would stand up and leave because they had to go to their church they had to go back to their farm now the system does that automatically for them so they're able to get their work life home balance back so it was different for them it was a jump for them anybody that's not used to technology and jumping into it is hard but once they started to see the benefits and what more yield they can get and the home work life balance it was amazing there's no i can't underestimate the work-life balance enough i think it's challenge it's a very challenging thing for people in any industry to achieve we've we've seen that in the last two years with you know do i live at work do i work from home so achieving that is kudos to you and for del for enabling that because that's that's big that that affects everybody guys thank you so much for joining us talking about ai what you're doing at nature fresh the future what's possible yeah and how you buy ai from dell no i think it's great i think you know nature fresh farms is a great euro you've been a great like a great partner for sure but also this great kind of beacon to show people how it can be done and i think it's just a thank you very much we really enjoyed it excellent well thanks for thanks for bringing the beacon on the show we appreciate it we want to thank you for watching for our guests i'm lisa martin for dave vellante i'm lisa martin i should say you're watching thecube day three of our coverage live from the show floor of dell tech world 2022 stick around we'll be right back with our next guest after a short break [Music] you

(upbeat music) >> From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is the CUBE Conversation. >> Hey everybody this is Dave Vellante and welcome to the special CUBE Conversation. I'm really excited to have Keith Bradley here he's the Vice President of IT at Nature Fresh Farms. Keith good to see you. >> Hey, good to see you too there Dave. >> All right, first of all I got to thank you for sending me these awesome veggies. I got these wonderful peppers. I got red, orange. I got the yellow. I got to tell you Keith these tomatoes almost didn't make it. It's my last one on the vine. >> (Laughs) >> These guys are like candy. It's amazing. >> Yap. They are the tasty thing. >> Wonderful. >> You know what, I'll probably just join you right here now too. I'll have one right here right now and I'll join you right now. >> My kids love these but I'm not bringing them home. And then I got these other grape tomatoes and then I've got these mini pepper poppers that are so sweet. You know which one I'm talking about here. And then we've got the tomatoes on the vine. I mean, it's just unbelievable that you guys are able to do this in a greenhouse. Big cukes, little cukes. Wow. Thank you so much for sending these. Delicious. Really appreciate it. >> Yeah. Well thank you for having them. It's a great little tree and it's something that I know you're going to enjoy. And I love for everybody to have it and there's not a person I haven't seen that hasn't enjoyed our tomatoes and peppers. >> Now tell me more about Nature Fresh Farms. Let's talk about your business I want to spend some time on that. We've got IoT, we got a data lifecycle. All kinds of cool stuff, scanners. Paint a picture for us. >> I like to even go... If you don't mind. I like to even go back to where our roots actually came from. So Peter Quiring, our owner actually was a builder by nature and he was actually back in the year 2000 really wanted to get into the greenhouse because he was a manufacturer. And he built our phase one facility back in 2000 under the concept that he said, "there's computers out there." And Peter will be the first one to say, "I don't know how to use them, "but I know that it can do a lot for us." So even back in 2000, we were starting to experiment with using the computers back then to control the greenhouse, to do much of the functionality. Then he bought it under the concept as our sister company, South Essex Fabricating that he would sell the greenhouse turnkey to somebody else. Well, talking to him and I've been around since about phase two. He basically said, "when I built phase three, "which is our first 32 acre range, I realized that is actually in the pepper business now," and he realized he was a grower and then he fell in love with the industry. And again, kept pushing how we can do things automated? How do we can do things? How do we get more yield, more everything out of what we do? And as a lover of technology he made it a great environment for everybody including the growers to work in and to just do something new. >> Well, I mean the thing that we know that as populations grow we're not getting more land. Okay (laughs). So, you have to get better yield and the answer is not to just pound vegetables with pesticides. So maybe talk about how you guys are different from sort of a conventional farming approach, just in terms of maybe your yield, how you treat the plants, how you're able to pick throughout the year, give us some insight there. >> So basically I'll start with through the lifecycle of a pepper. So it's basically planted at a propagator and then it comes to our facility and it comes in the little white boxes here behind me. And they actually are usually about that tall. They're about a foot tall. Maybe a little more when they come to us. And right from that point in time, we start keeping track of everything. How much we put water, how much water it doesn't take, what nutrients it takes, how much it weighs. We actually weigh the vines to know how much they are in real time. We do everything top to bottom. So we actually control the life cycle of the plant. On top of that, we also look and have a whole bio scout division. So it's a group of people that are starting to use AI to actually look at how the bugs are attacking the plants. And then at the same time, we release a good bug that will eventually die off to kill the bugs that are starting to harm the plant. So it basically allows us to basically do as close to natural way of growing a plant as possible without spraying or doing anything like that at night. It's actually funny 'cause there's a lot pictures out there and you think that a greenhouse, it's going to be wet in here. And actually for the most part, it is dry all the time. Like I'm very hot, it's very dry and it's just how we work. We don't let anything inside. We control everything in that plant's life. And now with our newest range, we even control how much light it gets. So we basically give it light all night too. And even some nights when it's a little days out, not like today, but when it's a little dark out and the sun's not up there, we'll actually make sure it gets more light to get that more yield out of it. So we can grow 24/7 12 months a year. >> Okay Keith. So it sounds like you're using data and AI to really inform you as to nature's best formula for the good bugs, the bad bugs, the lighting to really drive yields and quality. >> Yeah, we analyze, like I said, everything from the edge that we collect, like I said, we have over 2000 sensors out in the greenhouse and we keep expanding it more and more every year to collect everything from the length of the vine, the weight of the vine in real time. And we basically collect it from the day the plant is born to the day that we actually take it all out to be composted. We know how much light it got. Does it need to get light that day? We analyze everything in general and it allows us to take that data back in real time to make it better and to look at the past data to do better again. Like you hear, some times we have actually have a cart going by here now. That data from that cart, we'll go back to our growers and they will know how much weight they got out of that row in the next 15 to 20 minutes. So they can actually look, okay, how did that plant react to the sun, how's tomorrow? Does it need more nutrients? Does it need a little less? They take all that data from the core and make sure it's all accurate and as up to date as possible. >> So Keith, and maybe even you can give us approximations, but so how much acreage do you have? And how much acreage would you need with conventional farming techniques to get the kind of yields and quality that you guys are able to achieve? >> So we own 160 acres of greenhouse that's actually under glass. It's actually 200 acres total of land but what's 160 acres approximately of greenhouse that's actually under glass. 'A' we're always constantly growing. Our demand is up that that's why we grow so fast. Usually you're looking at both 12 to one. So for every foot squared of space, you're looking for equivalent is about 12 feet squared for a conventional farm. That's the general average. Mostly because we can harvest year round, we can continually harvest. We maximize the harvest amount and everything total. >> I'm also interested in your regime, your team. So obviously you're supporting from an IT perspective, but you've got all this AI going on. You've got this data life cycle. So what does the data team look like? >> We're actually... I always laugh though. I like to call our growers are basically data analysts. They're not really part of my IT team, but they basically have learned the role of how to analyze data. So we'll have basically one or two junior growers, per range. So probably about, I'd say about, we have about 10 to 12 junior growers and then one senior grower per whole farm. So probably about three or four senior growers at any one time. But my IT staff is actually about a team of four, five, including myself. And we are always constantly looking at how to improve data and how to automate the process. That's what drives us to do more. And that's where the robots even come in is every time we look at something, it's not even from an IT perspective, but even just from a picking perspective, how do we automate this? How do we do a better tomorrow? How do we continually clean this up? And it just never ends. And every year we look back, okay, it cost us a dollar per meter squared or per foot square for the people down South in America there now. We look at that and how do we do that better next year? How do we do better the next day? And it's a constant looking and it's something we look at refining and now that's why we're going so much into AI 'cause we want to not look at the data and decide what to do. We want the data to tell us what to do. >> You guys are on the cutting edge. I mean this is the future of farming. I wonder if we could talk about the IT, what does the IT group look like in the future of farming? I mean you guys, what's your infrastructure look like? Are you all in the cloud or you can't be in the cloud because this is really an extent of an IoT or an edge use case. Paint a picture of the IT infrastructure for us if you would. >> So the IT infrastructure it's a very large amount at the edge. We take a lot of the information from the edge and we bring it back to our core to do our analyzing. But for the most part, we don't really leverage the cloud much yet and most of it is on-prem. We are starting to experiment with moving out to the cloud. And a lot of it is, you'll laugh though, is because the farming and agriculture industry really was stagnant for a long time and not really stagnant, but just didn't really progress as fast as the rest of the world. So now they're just starting to catch up and realizing, wow, this is a growing industry. We can do a lot of cool things with technology in this range. And now it's just exploded. So I'm going to say in the next five to 10 years, you're going to see a lot more private clouds and things like that happening with us. I know we're right now starting to just look at creating with the VxRail, a private cloud, and a concept like that to start to test that water again of how to analyze and how to do more things onsite and in the cloud and leverage everything top to bottom. >> So you've got your own servers at the edge... So Intel based servers, what's your storage infrastructure look like? Maybe describe the network a little bit. >> Yap. Okay. So we are basically, I'll admit here, we are a Dell factory. We're basically everything top to bottom. Right now we're on an FX2, Dell FX2 platform. It's basically our core platform we've been using for the last five years. It does all of our analitics and stuff like that. And we have just transformed our unstructured data to Isilon. It's been one of the best things for us to clean that up and make things move forward. It was actually one of those things that management actually looked at me and kind of looked at me and said, "what are you nuts?" Because we basically bought our first Isilon and then four months later, I said, "I love this. I got to have more," because everybody loved it so much in the way of store things. So we actually doubled the size of it within four months, which was a great... It was actually very seamless to do, but we're now also in a position where the FX2 in that stage type of situation didn't quite work for us to expand it. It wasn't as easy to expand. So we wanted to get away that we could expand at a moment's notice. We can change, we can scale out much faster and do things easier. So that's why we're transforming to a VxRail to basically clean that up and allow us to expand as we grow. >> So you're essentially trying to replicate the agility and speed of the cloud but like you say, you're an edge use case. So you can't do everything in cloud. Is that the right way to think about it? You mentioned private cloud but just sort of cloud experience, but at the edge. >> Yeah. We try to keep everything at the edge. It just makes it a lot easier to control. Because we're so big. Think about it like you are bringing all this information back from everywhere. It's a lot of data to come back to one spot. So we're trying to push that more, to keep it at the edge so that we can analyze it right there in the moment instead of having to come back and do it but yeah. And I think you'll see in the next few years, a lot of change to the cloud, I think it'll start to be there, but again, like I said, the private cloud will probably be the way most will go. >> Okay. So I got to ask you then, I mean, you've really tested that agility over the last 60 days with this COVID pandemic. How were you able to respond? What role did data play? You had supply chain considerations. Obviously, you got a lot of online ordering going on. You got to get produce out. You've got social distancing. How were you able to handle that crisis? >> Well it was a really great thing for our team. Our team really came together in a great way. We had a lot of people that did have to go home and we started because we had so many ranges all over, already about a year and a half ago we started implementing an SD-WAN solution to allow us to connect to different areas and to do all kinds of stuff. So it was actually very quick for us to be able to send the others home. We used our VeloCloud SD-WAN to expand it. It was very seamless and we just started sending people home left, right and center. The staff that had to stay here, like the workers out in the greenhouse here now are offshore labor as we call it. They work great. They worked with at every moment of the day and they dug right in. We haven't lost heartbeat. Like actually our orders have gone up in the last... Through this COVID experience more than anything else. And it's really learned... It really helped from an IT perspective and I laugh about this and it's one of the greatest things about what I do, I love this moment, is where sometimes we were very hesitant to jump on this video collaboration. I said, "hey, that's a great way of doing this." But sometimes people they're very stuck in their ways and they love it and they're like, "I don't know about this whole team Zoom "and all that fun stuff," but because of this, they've now embraced it and it's actually really changed the way even they've worked. So in a way, it kind of sped up the processes of us becoming more agile that way in a way that would've taken a long time. They now love teams. They love being able to communicate that way. They love being able to just do a quick call. All that functionality has changed and even made us more efficient that way. (mumbles) >> How does this all affect your IT budget allocation? Did you get more budget? Was it flat budget? Did you have to shift budget to sort of work from home and securing the remote workers? Can you sort of describe that dynamic? >> So it did, I'll be true, there's no way around it to not up my budge. They basically said, "yep, "you have to do what you have to do. "We have to continue to function, "we cannot let our greenhouse go down "and what do you need to do to make it happen?" So I quickly contacted Dell and got things coming and improve our infrastructure as much as we could to get ready. I contacted (mumbles). I basically made it so that my team can support every single part of our facet from home if they actually had to go home. So for example, if I had to get stuck at home, I could do every single part of my job from home, including the growers as much as possible. So say our senior grower had to get home. I locked him up. He has to be able to see everything and do everything. So we actually expanded that very quickly and it was a cost to us. But again, there's no technology we didn't implement that we hadn't talked about before. We just hadn't said, "you know what? It's just not the right time to try that." And now we just went ahead and we just said, we got to do it now. And there's not one part of our aspect that we don't reuse. >> Was Dell able to deliver? Did they have supply constraint issues? I mean, I know there's been huge demand for that whole remote worker. Were able to get what you needed in time? >> Yeah. You know what, I think that we hit it a little ahead of the scope of when things started to go bad, our senior management, our president and all that. He basically said, "you know Keith, "we got to get ready on this. "We got to get some stuff coming." We never ran out of some things. The quirkiest thing and it is just a reality, the biggest thing was webcams was to kind of trying to get webcams. Other than that, there was issues with UPS and Purolator and FedEx because they were just inundated too. But for the most part, we kept everything moving. There wasn't a time that I was actually really waiting on something that we had to have. One of the other great things of our senior team that's here is they've really given me the latitude to say, "what do you need and how do you need to do it?" And so I have my own basically storage area of stuff everywhere. And my team does laugh at me 'cause they call me a hoarder and I basically have too much. And we were able to use either some older stuff or some newer stuff and combine it and we got everything running. There was only a little hiccups here and there but nothing ever is going to go perfect. >> Yeah. But it's enabling business results. We've asked a lot of it pros like yourself like what do you expect the shape of the recovery? And obviously our hearts go out to those small businesses that have been decimated. You're clearly seeing industries like airlines and hospitality and restaurants are obviously in rough shape, but there is a bifurcated story here. Some businesses and it sounds like in this camp where the pandemic was actually a tailwind, your online demand is up, food, vegetables, people... There were a lot of meat shortages. So people really turn to vegetables, is that right? Is that the shape of the recovery actually, is maybe not even V-shape, it's been a tailwind for Nature Fresh Farms. >> Yeah. You know what? It has been a tailwind and that's the right way to say it. We've just increased our yieldage. We've increased that, it's not unnew for us, that's been the biggest driving force for us is basically the demand for our product and building fast enough to keep up to that demand. Like we continually build and expand. We've got more ranges being built in the coming years like looking towards the 21, 22, 23 year. It's just going to just continue to expand and that is purely because of demand. And this COVID just again, escalated that little bit 'cause everybody's like, I really want the peppers and like you learned, we actually do have some tasty peppers and tomatoes. So it does make it a nice little treat to have at home for the kids. >> Well, it's an amazing story of tech meets farming. And as you said for years your industry kind of became quiet when it came to tech, but this is the future of farming, in my opinion. And Keith, thanks so much for coming on the CUBE and sharing the story of Nature Fresh Farms. >> Well, thank you for having me. It's been a great pleasure. >> Alright. Thank you for watching everybody this is Dave Vellante for the CUBE and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is the CUBE Conversation. >> Hey everybody this is Dave Vellante and welcome to the special CUBE Conversation. I'm really excited to have Keith Bradley here he's the Vice President of IT at Nature Fresh Farms. Keith good to see you. >> Hey, good to see you too there Dave. >> All right, first of all I got to thank you for sending me these awesome veggies. I got these wonderful peppers. I got red, orange. I got the yellow. I got to tell you Keith these tomatoes almost didn't make it. It's my last one on the vine. >> (Laughs) >> These guys are like candy. It's amazing. >> Yap. They are the tasty thing. >> Wonderful. >> You know what, I'll probably just join you right here now too. I'll have one right here right now and I'll join you right now. >> My kids love these but I'm not bringing them home. And then I got these other grape tomatoes and then I've got these mini pepper poppers that are so sweet. You know which one I'm talking about here. And then we've got the tomatoes on the vine. I mean, it's just unbelievable that you guys are able to do this in a greenhouse. Big cukes, little cukes. Wow. Thank you so much for sending these. Delicious. Really appreciate it. >> Yeah. Well thank you for having them. It's a great little tree and it's something that I know you're going to enjoy. And I love for everybody to have it and there's not a person I haven't seen that hasn't enjoyed our tomatoes and peppers. >> Now tell me more about Nature Fresh Farms. Let's talk about your business I want to spend some time on that. We've got IoT, we got a data lifecycle. All kinds of cool stuff, scanners. Paint a picture for us. >> I like to even go... If you don't mind. I like to even go back to where our roots actually came from. So Peter Quiring, our owner actually was a builder by nature and he was actually back in the year 2000 really wanted to get into the greenhouse because he was a manufacturer. And he built our phase one facility back in 2000 under the concept that he said, "there's computers out there." And Peter will be the first one to say, "I don't know how to use them, "but I know that it can do a lot for us." So even back in 2000, we were starting to experiment with using the computers back then to control the greenhouse, to do much of the functionality. Then he bought it under the concept as our sister company, South Essex Fabricating that he would sell the greenhouse turnkey to somebody else. Well, talking to him and I've been around since about phase two. He basically said, "when I built phase three, "which is our first 32 acre range, I realized that is actually in the pepper business now," and he realized he was a grower and then he fell in love with the industry. And again, kept pushing how we can do things automated? How do we can do things? How do we get more yield, more everything out of what we do? And as a lover of technology he made it a great environment for everybody including the growers to work in and to just do something new. >> Well, I mean the thing that we know that as populations grow we're not getting more land. Okay (laughs). So, you have to get better yield and the answer is not to just pound vegetables with pesticides. So maybe talk about how you guys are different from sort of a conventional farming approach, just in terms of maybe your yield, how you treat the plants, how you're able to pick throughout the year, give us some insight there. >> So basically I'll start with through the lifecycle of a pepper. So it's basically planted at a propagator and then it comes to our facility and it comes in the little white boxes here behind me. And they actually are usually about that tall. They're about a foot tall. Maybe a little more when they come to us. And right from that point in time, we start keeping track of everything. How much we put water, how much water it doesn't take, what nutrients it takes, how much it weighs. We actually weigh the vines to know how much they are in real time. We do everything top to bottom. So we actually control the life cycle of the plant. On top of that, we also look and have a whole bio scout division. So it's a group of people that are starting to use AI to actually look at how the bugs are attacking the plants. And then at the same time, we release a good bug that will eventually die off to kill the bugs that are starting to harm the plant. So it basically allows us to basically do as close to natural way of growing a plant as possible without spraying or doing anything like that at night. It's actually funny 'cause there's a lot pictures out there and you think that a greenhouse, it's going to be wet in here. And actually for the most part, it is dry all the time. Like I'm very hot, it's very dry and it's just how we work. We don't let anything inside. We control everything in that plant's life. And now with our newest range, we even control how much light it gets. So we basically give it light all night too. And even some nights when it's a little days out, not like today, but when it's a little dark out and the sun's not up there, we'll actually make sure it gets more light to get that more yield out of it. So we can grow 24/7 12 months a year. >> Okay Keith. So it sounds like you're using data and AI to really inform you as to nature's best formula for the good bugs, the bad bugs, the lighting to really drive yields and quality. >> Yeah, we analyze, like I said, everything from the edge that we collect, like I said, we have over 2000 sensors out in the greenhouse and we keep expanding it more and more every year to collect everything from the length of the vine, the weight of the vine in real time. And we basically collect it from the day the plant is born to the day that we actually take it all out to be composted. We know how much light it got. Does it need to get light that day? We analyze everything in general and it allows us to take that data back in real time to make it better and to look at the past data to do better again. Like you hear, some times we have actually have a cart going by here now. That data from that cart, we'll go back to our growers and they will know how much weight they got out of that row in the next 15 to 20 minutes. So they can actually look, okay, how did that plant react to the sun, how's tomorrow? Does it need more nutrients? Does it need a little less? They take all that data from the core and make sure it's all accurate and as up to date as possible. >> So Keith, and maybe even you can give us approximations, but so how much acreage do you have? And how much acreage would you need with conventional farming techniques to get the kind of yields and quality that you guys are able to achieve? >> So we own 160 acres of greenhouse that's actually under glass. It's actually 200 acres total of land but what's 160 acres approximately of greenhouse that's actually under glass. 'A' we're always constantly growing. Our demand is up that that's why we grow so fast. Usually you're looking at both 12 to one. So for every foot squared of space, you're looking for equivalent is about 12 feet squared for a conventional farm. That's the general average. Mostly because we can harvest year round, we can continually harvest. We maximize the harvest amount and everything total. >> I'm also interested in your regime, your team. So obviously you're supporting from an IT perspective, but you've got all this AI going on. You've got this data life cycle. So what does the data team look like? >> We're actually... I always laugh though. I like to call our growers are basically data analysts. They're not really part of my IT team, but they basically have learned the role of how to analyze data. So we'll have basically one or two junior growers, per range. So probably about, I'd say about, we have about 10 to 12 junior growers and then one senior grower per whole farm. So probably about three or four senior growers at any one time. But my IT staff is actually about a team of four, five, including myself. And we are always constantly looking at how to improve data and how to automate the process. That's what drives us to do more. And that's where the robots even come in is every time we look at something, it's not even from an IT perspective, but even just from a picking perspective, how do we automate this? How do we do a better tomorrow? How do we continually clean this up? And it just never ends. And every year we look back, okay, it cost us a dollar per meter squared or per foot square for the people down South in America there now. We look at that and how do we do that better next year? How do we do better the next day? And it's a constant looking and it's something we look at refining and now that's why we're going so much into AI 'cause we want to not look at the data and decide what to do. We want the data to tell us what to do. >> You guys are on the cutting edge. I mean this is the future of farming. I wonder if we could talk about the IT, what does the IT group look like in the future of farming? I mean you guys, what's your infrastructure look like? Are you all in the cloud or you can't be in the cloud because this is really an extent of an IoT or an edge use case. Paint a picture of the IT infrastructure for us if you would. >> So the IT infrastructure it's a very large amount at the edge. We take a lot of the information from the edge and we bring it back to our core to do our analyzing. But for the most part, we don't really leverage the cloud much yet and most of it is on-prem. We are starting to experiment with moving out to the cloud. And a lot of it is, you'll laugh though, is because the farming and agriculture industry really was stagnant for a long time and not really stagnant, but just didn't really progress as fast as the rest of the world. So now they're just starting to catch up and realizing, wow, this is a growing industry. We can do a lot of cool things with technology in this range. And now it's just exploded. So I'm going to say in the next five to 10 years, you're going to see a lot more private clouds and things like that happening with us. I know we're right now starting to just look at creating with the VxRail, a private cloud, and a concept like that to start to test that water again of how to analyze and how to do more things onsite and in the cloud and leverage everything top to bottom. >> So you've got your own servers at the edge... So Intel based servers, what's your storage infrastructure look like? Maybe describe the network a little bit. >> Yap. Okay. So we are basically, I'll admit here, we are a Dell factory. We're basically everything top to bottom. Right now we're on an FX2, Dell FX2 platform. It's basically our core platform we've been using for the last five years. It does all of our analitics and stuff like that. And we have just transformed our unstructured data to Isilon. It's been one of the best things for us to clean that up and make things move forward. It was actually one of those things that management actually looked at me and kind of looked at me and said, "what are you nuts?" Because we basically bought our first Isilon and then four months later, I said, "I love this. I got to have more," because everybody loved it so much in the way of store things. So we actually doubled the size of it within four months, which was a great... It was actually very seamless to do, but we're now also in a position where the FX2 in that stage type of situation didn't quite work for us to expand it. It wasn't as easy to expand. So we wanted to get away that we could expand at a moment's notice. We can change, we can scale out much faster and do things easier. So that's why we're transforming to a VxRail to basically clean that up and allow us to expand as we grow. >> So you're essentially trying to replicate the agility and speed of the cloud but like you say, you're an edge use case. So you can't do everything in cloud. Is that the right way to think about it? You mentioned private cloud but just sort of cloud experience, but at the edge. >> Yeah. We try to keep everything at the edge. It just makes it a lot easier to control. Because we're so big. Think about it like you are bringing all this information back from everywhere. It's a lot of data to come back to one spot. So we're trying to push that more, to keep it at the edge so that we can analyze it right there in the moment instead of having to come back and do it but yeah. And I think you'll see in the next few years, a lot of change to the cloud, I think it'll start to be there, but again, like I said, the private cloud will probably be the way most will go. >> Okay. So I got to ask you then, I mean, you've really tested that agility over the last 60 days with this COVID pandemic. How were you able to respond? What role did data play? You had supply chain considerations. Obviously, you got a lot of online ordering going on. You got to get produce out. You've got social distancing. How were you able to handle that crisis? >> Well it was a really great thing for our team. Our team really came together in a great way. We had a lot of people that did have to go home and we started because we had so many ranges all over, already about a year and a half ago we started implementing an SD-WAN solution to allow us to connect to different areas and to do all kinds of stuff. So it was actually very quick for us to be able to send the others home. We used our VeloCloud SD-WAN to expand it. It was very seamless and we just started sending people home left, right and center. The staff that had to stay here, like the workers out in the greenhouse here now are offshore labor as we call it. They work great. They worked with at every moment of the day and they dug right in. We haven't lost heartbeat. Like actually our orders have gone up in the last... Through this COVID experience more than anything else. And it's really learned... It really helped from an IT perspective and I laugh about this and it's one of the greatest things about what I do, I love this moment, is where sometimes we were very hesitant to jump on this video collaboration. I said, "hey, that's a great way of doing this." But sometimes people they're very stuck in their ways and they love it and they're like, "I don't know about this whole team Zoom "and all that fun stuff," but because of this, they've now embraced it and it's actually really changed the way even they've worked. So in a way, it kind of sped up the processes of us becoming more agile that way in a way that would've taken a long time. They now love teams. They love being able to communicate that way. They love being able to just do a quick call. All that functionality has changed and even made us more efficient that way. (mumbles) >> How does this all affect your IT budget allocation? Did you get more budget? Was it flat budget? Did you have to shift budget to sort of work from home and securing the remote workers? Can you sort of describe that dynamic? >> So it did, I'll be true, there's no way around it to not up my budge. They basically said, "yep, "you have to do what you have to do. "We have to continue to function, "we cannot let our greenhouse go down "and what do you need to do to make it happen?" So I quickly contacted Dell and got things coming and improve our infrastructure as much as we could to get ready. I contacted (mumbles). I basically made it so that my team can support every single part of our facet from home if they actually had to go home. So for example, if I had to get stuck at home, I could do every single part of my job from home, including the growers as much as possible. So say our senior grower had to get home. I locked him up. He has to be able to see everything and do everything. So we actually expanded that very quickly and it was a cost to us. But again, there's no technology we didn't implement that we hadn't talked about before. We just hadn't said, "you know what? It's just not the right time to try that." And now we just went ahead and we just said, we got to do it now. And there's not one part of our aspect that we don't reuse. >> Was Dell able to deliver? Did they have supply constraint issues? I mean, I know there's been huge demand for that whole remote worker. Were able to get what you needed in time? >> Yeah. You know what, I think that we hit it a little ahead of the scope of when things started to go bad, our senior management, our president and all that. He basically said, "you know Keith, "we got to get ready on this. "We got to get some stuff coming." We never ran out of some things. The quirkiest thing and it is just a reality, the biggest thing was webcams was to kind of trying to get webcams. Other than that, there was issues with UPS and Purolator and FedEx because they were just inundated too. But for the most part, we kept everything moving. There wasn't a time that I was actually really waiting on something that we had to have. One of the other great things of our senior team that's here is they've really given me the latitude to say, "what do you need and how do you need to do it?" And so I have my own basically storage area of stuff everywhere. And my team does laugh at me 'cause they call me a hoarder and I basically have too much. And we were able to use either some older stuff or some newer stuff and combine it and we got everything running. There was only a little hiccups here and there but nothing ever is going to go perfect. >> Yeah. But it's enabling business results. We've asked a lot of it pros like yourself like what do you expect the shape of the recovery? And obviously our hearts go out to those small businesses that have been decimated. You're clearly seeing industries like airlines and hospitality and restaurants are obviously in rough shape, but there is a bifurcated story here. Some businesses and it sounds like in this camp where the pandemic was actually a tailwind, your online demand is up, food, vegetables, people... There were a lot of meat shortages. So people really turn to vegetables, is that right? Is that the shape of the recovery actually, is maybe not even V-shape, it's been a tailwind for Nature Fresh Farms. >> Yeah. You know what? It has been a tailwind and that's the right way to say it. We've just increased our yieldage. We've increased that, it's not unnew for us, that's been the biggest driving force for us is basically the demand for our product and building fast enough to keep up to that demand. Like we continually build and expand. We've got more ranges being built in the coming years like looking towards the 21, 22, 23 year. It's just going to just continue to expand and that is purely because of demand. And this COVID just again, escalated that little bit 'cause everybody's like, I really want the peppers and like you learned, we actually do have some tasty peppers and tomatoes. So it does make it a nice little treat to have at home for the kids. >> Well, it's an amazing story of tech meets farming. And as you said for years your industry kind of became quiet when it came to tech, but this is the future of farming, in my opinion. And Keith, thanks so much for coming on the CUBE and sharing the story of Nature Fresh Farms. >> Well, thank you for having me. It's been a great pleasure. >> Alright. Thank you for watching everybody this is Dave Vellante for the CUBE and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)