 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. Hi, welcome back to theCUBE. 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 Bulls Farming Company. Welcome. Thank you. Great to have you. And we have Megan Noon, 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 is a six generation farm, Bulls Farming Company based in Los Banos, California. One of the things I found really interesting when I was doing some research on Bulls 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 Bulls Farms has done and what you've been saving on energy. Right. So with Bulls Farming in agriculture in general, there's been kind of a stagnation of innovation and through technology 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 pressurize drip irrigation systems. And so we've used pressurized pumps that use diesel and energy and we've been switching them over to electricity and that's been an efficiency for Bulls Farming. But 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. Was that a multi-year project that you initiated? It was supposed to happen in 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 a diversified row crop 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 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, it must be cage-free if it's eggs, 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 Bulls Farm made some changes to accommodate that? So our crop choice, so the consumer is actually voting with our fork is actually a real thing. And 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 VinCite, talk to us about the Genesis events that 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 Luis, Bispo, 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, it's called NDVI, which basically is a health map of red, green and yellow. Wasn't necessarily helpful or terribly actionable and that really bothered me. 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 VinCite 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 especially grapes being huge. I mean, Napa, Edna Valley, Paso Robles, we're very fortunate to have 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 technology is 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 VinCite 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, satellite imagery, climate and weather, historical yields, and then geographical information. So primarily that'll be like soil type, elevation, angling and so on. And what we do is we've 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 to set 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 10 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 of the things that I find interesting is the post harvest arena and supply chain logistics traceability. Talking about almonds I was reading and this was very surprising to me that in the last three years over 35 truckloads of almonds have vanished. And that's tantamount to $10 million. 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 Bulls 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. And so Bulls Farming has actually a pretty unique story about this in that our cotton that we grow is a pima cotton. Costco sold a bed sheets 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. It's actually not pima cotton is upland or primary blend. And so with that, he applied the same technology that he did with olive oil to the cotton industry. We're the first farm and the first gin to sign up with them to do traceability from basically from farm all the way to sheets. Yeah, so. Wow, farm the sheets. Farm the sheets, yeah. You're done today. Exactly, so they're now, it's a brand is a Watsuma, a pima cotton brand and they're available at Bed Bath & Beyond. Wow, so looking at what Megan has done with VinCite, being a sixth generation farm. What's the, 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 Bulls is a legacy of innovation and we're an innovative farm and 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 cost of farming in California, innovation is 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, it has a great ROI just like the drip irrigation, they'll implement that pretty quickly. Oh, fantastic. Well Curtis, we wish you the best of luck at Bulls Farms, Megan, same congratulations on Vinsight. We wish you the very best of luck and we thank you both for joining us on theCUBE. 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 theCUBE. Stick around, we'll be right back.