>> Announcer: Live 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. I'm Lisa Martin, we are at the fourth annual Food IT: Fork to Farm Event at the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley. I'm very excited to be joined by my next two guests, we have Curtis Garner, Senior Farm Analyst from Bowles Farming Company, welcome. >> Thank you. >> Great to have you, and we have Megan Nunes, CEO of Vinsight. Welcome! >> Thank you! >> Great to have you guys here. So this event is so interesting for us. We cover a lot of technology innovation, a lot on the infrastructure side, this is more on the application side, but Curtis, I wanted to start with you being a farmer, your farm has been, a six-generation farm, Bowles Farming Company based in Los Banos, California. One of the things I found really interesting, when I was doing some research on Bowles Farm, is that you have a big solar project, and one of the things that's really interesting, it's been reported that the US food system uses 15% of the total energy of the US, to produce food. Tell us about the solar project, that Bowles Farms has done, and what you've been saving on energy. >> So, with Bowles Farming and agriculture in general, there's been kind of a stagnation of innovation, and through technology with drip irrigation, we've seen a difference in technology from doing gravity-fed irrigation, which is basically free energy, right, gravity doesn't cost anything, to pressurized drip irrigation systems, and so we've used pressurized pumps that use diesel energy, and we've been switching them over to electricity, and that's been an efficiency for Bowles Farming, but we've, we've offset our costs by two solar plants and so we have two solar plants, two 500-kilowatt energy to generate one megawatt of energy, we've displaced about 80% of our energy use on the farm. >> 80%, that's dramatic. And was that a multi-year project that you initiated? >> It was supposed to happen about a year, but through regulation and difficulties with permitting and PG&E, it took about a year and a half to complete. We'll see the benefits of it this year. >> And your primary crops are cotton, tomatoes, nuts, almonds ... >> So, yeah. We're diverse, diversified row crops, so we have 12 different crops, but our primary crops are Pima cotton, and processing tomatoes. >> So, question for you from a technology perspective, this event is so interesting because, when I first read the title like I thought, fork-to-farm, we're so used to the trendiness of farm-to-table, right, farm-to-fork. But, the fact that the tech-enabled consumer has really influenced, or wants to influence, organic, must be cage-free if it's eggs, you know, it must be, non-genetic, et cetera. What are some of the influences that you're seeing on the farming side that the consumer is driving, and how has Bowles Farm made some changes to accommodate that? >> So our crop choice, so the consumer is actually voting with their fork, is actually a real thing. So like, the most posted food picture on Instagram and Pinterest is actually a purple vegetable. So a thought on the farm is, should we be growing a bunch of purple vegetables? And so, it's actually very real that the consumers are driving production. >> Yeah, interesting! So Megan, as the CEO of Vinsight, talk to us about the genesis of Vinsight. You yourself come from a farming background. What was the origination of your company? >> Yeah, so, I grew up in the Central Valley of California, I'm originally from a small town called Gustine, and I left Gustine, went to college in San Louis Obispo at Cal Poly, and then after that I worked for an aerospace company in the remote sensing space for about seven years. And while I was there, one of the things that we were looking at doing was providing satellite imagery to farmers, and different growers, and quickly I realized that the traditional imagery that the satellite imagery business was providing through um, it's called NBDI, which basically is a health map of red, green, and yellow. Wasn't necessarily helpful or terribly actionable, and that really bothered me, and so through lots of conversations and investigation that I took on my own, I decided, you know what, it's time to start something on my own, through utilizing different data techniques to better understand food production. And so Vinsight was basically initially born out of the idea of utilizing satellite imagery, in a more meaningful way to benefit growers and then the entire supply chain as a whole. And that later turned into crop forecasting for grapes and almonds here in California. >> And, and, especially, you know, grapes being huge, I mean, Napa, Edna Valley, Pasa Robles, we're very fortunate to have a, a tremendous amount of grapes and wine opportunities, but you mentioned almonds. 90% of the world's almonds come from California. Talk to us about how maybe an example of how a farm is using your technologies, like, are you putting sensors in their farms or is it really they're utilizing satellite imagery and data acquisition through your product and API, to improve their yields? >> So it's more of the latter. At Vinsight, our objective is to be data agnostic, and so what that means is we take in data from any source that allows us to better understand production as a whole. And so what happens is we collect data from four major categories, which include remote sensing data or satellite imagery, climate and weather, historical yield, and then geographical information, so primarily that'll be like soil type, elevation angling, and so on. And what we do, is we built out this 20-year historical archive, and we've utilized machine learning techniques to train on that data and understand what matters to the plant at this specific point in time, and how does that correlate and trend against what we've seen in the past. And so in real time, during the growing season, we pull in like the top ten features that matter, to that plant at that specific time, and then we give you a crop forecast of, hey, you're going to produce so many pounds or tons, depending on the industry, of x product, and we're assuming a 10% or better error rate typically on understanding your total production. And so our goal is, through starting with understanding your total supply, how can that also start to relate into how we handle pricing and how that ultimately will benefit both the grower and consumer at the end of the day. >> Interesting, so, about the production yields, I wanted to kind of talk, Curtis, to you about, if you look at the food chain from planting, through monitoring soil conditions, fertilizers, water, we've just gotten out of a massive drought here in California, one other thing that it's, that I find interesting is the post-harvest arena, and you know, supply chain logistics traceability. Talking about almonds, I was reading, and this is very surprising, to me, that in the last three years, over 35 truckloads of almonds have vanished, and that's tantamount to ten million dollars. So on the traceability side, I know that's going to be one of the themes at the event today, how are you using technology, Curtis, at Bowles Farms, on the traceability? Can you give us some examples there? >> Yeah, so traceability is a very big deal for the farm and the consumer and the producer. Bowles Farming has actually a pretty unique story about this in that, our cotton that we grow is a Pima cotton. Costco sold bedsheets that were Pima cotton, and they had the olive oil scandal, the same guy that did that, did a market sweep of all the Pima cotton sheets that represented that they were 100% Pima, found that over half the supply was actually adulterated, is actually not Pima cotton, is Upland or primarily a blend. And so with that, he applied the same technology that he did with olive oil to the cotton industry, and we are the first farm and the first gin to sign up with him, to do traceability, from basically from farm all the way to sheets. Yeah, and so ... >> Wow, farm to sheets. >> Farm to sheets, yeah >> Didn't expect to hear that today. >> Yeah, I guess so. They're now, it's, the brand is Wamsutta, the Pima cotton brand, and they're available at the Bed Bath & Beyond. >> Wow, so, looking at what Megan has done with Vinsight, being a six-generational, six-generation farm, what's the, um, what are your thoughts, as a senior farm analyst, on the adoption of technology? Was it something that was slow to be adopted, or do you really feel, we've been so successful for six generations, we want to understand how we can look at data types that are aggregated as Megan, you said over 20 years of historical information, what's been that adoption at your farm? >> So Bowles has a legacy of innovation, and we're an innovative farm, we have a lot of innovative people and so, for us, it's a matter of survival. So with the regulatory pressures, with the increasing costs of California, farming in California, innovation's going to be key, and that's going to come in the role of technology, and so, we're pretty quick to adopt. If you look at farmers as a whole, people think that they're overall-wearing, individuals that aren't very intelligent, but it's actually quite the opposite, and if a new technology comes that has a great ROI, just like the drip irrigation, they'll implement that, though, pretty quickly. >> Oh, fantastic. Well, Curtis, we wish you the best of luck at Bowles Farms, Megan, same, congratulations on Vinsight, we wish you the very best of luck and we thank you both for joining us on The Cube. >> Thank you! >> Thank you! >> We want to thank you for watching again. We are at the Food IT: Fork to Farm Summit in the heart of Silicon Valley. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube. Stick around, we'll be right back. (techno music sting)