 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 been 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's Soup has been around since the late 1800s that 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, 170 something, 60 something, whatever, they're getting old, right? So there's going to be a huge turnover in this industry. So both the challenge as well as an opportunity for the next generation of ag people to make some of these changes and it changed 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's reaction to the consumer, which we see over and over and over and all the other shows that we go. The consumerization IT driven by younger people's interaction with their phone 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's 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 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, to reduce their costs 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. And then as you mentioned on the tech-enabled consumers that I was joking with, Jeff, earlier, I kept thinking farm to fork, because farm to table is so trendy now, right? There's a lot of apps. And you gave me this, aha, grasshopper look. And it was really because as consumers, we've really demanded so much. We want transparency. We want exactly what's in things. We want organic and hormone-free. We also want things delivered whenever, 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-hervest 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 don't understand, 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. Yeah, a lot of talk about kind of, there wasn't a lot of data now, and now it's a data flood. So how to use those data sources to be more intelligent on what you do? And I specifically asked some of the guests, are the big, kind of the classic big data players participating in the space? And she said, not really. They're all kind of holding off to the side, waiting to get in, but these are big numbers. This is big impact. The professor from San Luis Obispo 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 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 call it a food shot in reference to moonshot, enable better diets, shift diets, food transparency, reduce 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 thereabouts. So really an interesting kind of twist on what you would not expect from kind of the food service people, you think of them just supplying food. 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 from a supply perspective, making things, meeting those challenges that the consumers are demanding, but he 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, I didn't 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 on news resources. So, one of the food trucks today 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 farm, can't say fork the farm tradition, because before kale was a throwaway, nobody grew kale. Now suddenly everybody wants kale smoothies. And so this 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 is probably 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, you know, 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, you know, 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, data, 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 loved how the Forbes Ag Tech Summit, that's, 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 in some of the dynamics that they've seen. I think it says, this was their fourth event tomorrow, 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. And robots, we need robots. We don't have much 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 to load that coke, you can hit the button to load that salad while you run off and pull the rest of the entree meals together. So, you know, again, it's really fun to see kind of the consistent themes that we see over and over at Computing Cloud and data-driven decision-making applied to what's arguably, you know, 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. Oh, great time. It's 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, I don't know, 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. All right, Lisa, well, thank you again for hosting again to 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. All right. She's Lisa Martin. 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 and then we'll hit it hard again in the fall. So, thanks for watching SiliconANGLE.TV, YouTube.com slash SiliconANGLE and SiliconANGLE.com for a complete coverage of a lot of stories beyond just theCUBE. I'm Jeff Frick, signing off for Lisa Martin from FoodIT, from fork to food. Thanks for watching.