 From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi 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. These guys are like candy. It's amazing. They are the tasty thing. You know, I'll probably just join you right here now too. I'll have one right here, you know, we're out 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 got these mini pepper poppers that are so sweet. You know what's what I'm talking about here. And then I got the tomatoes on the vine. I mean, ah, I mean, it's just unbelievable that you guys are able to do this in a greenhouse. Big kukes, little kukes. Wow, thank you so much for sending these. Delicious, really appreciate it. Yeah, well, thank you for having them. It's a great little treat. And it's something that I know you're gonna enjoy and you know, I love for everybody 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 wanna spend some time on that. We got IoT, we got a data life cycle, all kinds of, you know, cool stuff, scanners, paint a picture for us. I'd like to even go, if you don't mind, I'd like to even go back to where our roots actually came from. So Peter Kweiner, our owner, actually was a builder by nature and he was actually back in the year 2000, really wanted to get into the greenhouse business. 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 Pete 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 term key 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 it's 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 to just do something new. Well, I mean, the thing that we know that as populations grow, we're not getting more land. Okay, 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 started through the life cycle of the pepper. So it's basically planted at a propagator and it comes from 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, living 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 in, 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 that plant. On top of that, we also look and have a whole bioscout 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 a, as close to natural way of growing a plant as possible without spraying or doing anything like that at night. It's actually funny because there's a lot of pictures out there and you think that a greenhouse, oh, it's gonna 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 little days, when it's a little dark 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. Yep, yeah, we analyze, like I said, everything from the edge that we collect. Like I said, we have over 2,000 sensors out in the greenhouse and we keep expanding it more and more every year to collect everything from the height of the van, 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 more 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 day to do it better again. Like you can hear sometimes, well I actually have a cart going by here now, that data from that cart will 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 is 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 it's up to date as possible. So Keith, maybe even you can give us approximations 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 it'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 about a 12 to one. So for every foot squared of space, you're looking for the 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 lifecycle. 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 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, we're 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 it 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 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 that we look at refining and now that's why we're going so much into AI because we wanna 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 and 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 a sort 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 a 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 on site and in the cloud and leverage everything top to bottom. So you got your own servers at the edge. So what Intel based servers, what's your storage infrastructure look like? Describe the network a little bit. Yeah, okay. So we are basically, I'll admit to you, we are a Dell factory. We're basically everything top to bottom. We are, 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 analysts and stuff like that and we have just transformed our unstructured data to Icelon. 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 Icelon and then four months later I said, I love this, I gotta have more because everybody loved it so much in the way it stored 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 and that type of situation didn't quite work for us to expand. 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 the 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 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, 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 really tested that agility over the last 60 days with this COVID pandemic. How were you able to respond? What role did the 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. I think 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 users 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 green house here now, our offshore labor as we call it, they were great. They work with it every minute of the day and they dug right in. We haven't lost a heartbeat. Like actually our orders have gone up and a lot 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, it's a great way of doing this. But sometimes people are 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 took sped up the processes of us becoming more agile that way in a way that would have 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 it even made us more efficient that way. So how does this all affect, how does this affect your IT budget allocation? Did you get more budget? Was it, you know, flat budget? Did you, did you have to shift budget to sort of work from home and securing the remote workers? Can you just sort of describe that dynamic? So it did, I'll be true. There's no way around it to not up my budget. 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 got improved our infrastructure as much as we could to get ready. I contacted support, you laughed though. I basically made it so that my team could 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 asked me, you'll see everything and do everything. So we actually expanded that very quickly and it was a cost to us. But again, there was 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. What 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 you able to get what you needed in time? Yeah, you know what? I think that we headed a little ahead of the scope of when things started to go bad. Our senior, senior management, our president and all that, he basically said, you know, Keith, we got to get right on this. We got to get some stuff coming. We never ran out of some things. The corkiest thing and it is just a reality. The biggest thing was webcams was trying to get webcams. Other than that, there was issues with UPS and PureLater 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, really waiting on something that we had to have. One of the other great things of our senior team that is 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 because they called 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's 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 you're in this camp where the pandemic was actually a tailwind. Online demand is up, food, vegetables, people, there were a lot of meat shortages so people really turn to vegetables. Is that right that the shape of the recovery actually is maybe not even V shape, it's been a tailwind for nature, fresh farms. Yeah, 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 a new for us, we've actually, 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 got more ranges being built in the coming years, like looking forward to 21, 22, 23 year, it's just, we're going to continue to expand and that is purely because of demand and this COVID just again escalated that little bit because 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 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 story, coming on theCUBE and sharing the story of Nature Fresh Farms. Well, thank you for having me. It's been a great pleasure. All right, thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time.