 Good afternoon on Thursday folks, Ted Rawson here at downtown Honolulu Studios of ThinkTec, Hawaii. It was our show where the drone leads where we talk about subjects that are relevant to the emerging and useful aspects of drones. We have with us today a guy who's been around Honolulu for a long time in the high-tech area, the venture capital area, entrepreneur area, and he's been escaping being on this show all that time. But we got him today. I'd like to welcome on board today Mr. Vince Kimura. Vince. Thanks for falling for the bait this time coming out of the show. Thanks for having me on the show. And the way it works once you're on, you've got to come back. Love to. Love to. So you're on here on our show where the drone leads and you as the founder, CEO, and original thinker behind a new emerging company called SmartYields have an interest in drones. Yes, we do. And let's talk a little bit about that. SmartYields first of all and how you got that started and where it's going. Sure. So gosh, starting with a drone. By the way, we have a drone on the table here. This shows where the drone leads. You and I both have to say the word drone once and then we can talk about whatever we want. Sounds good. Well, this is a great drone. Thank you. This is actually the drone that we met that years ago. Yes, it is. Yes, you're showcasing this drone. This is your European technology. So we said drone about five times so we got that out of the way. Now let's talk about SmartYields. Well, thank you. So SmartYields is a tool we see to really help small growers in particular take the guesswork out of farming. And growers all around the world have a really big issue, one, they're making decisions based on their gut. And the second thing is they're using tradition and what they've done in the past and what their grandparents have done, et cetera, as the decision, decision support. So as with any industry, agriculture being the oldest industry in the world, we're kind of questioning like why is that the case? Why isn't there more technology and support and money being poured into food? And really, when you look at the food supply chain, and I don't want to go into the specifics of this because everyone knows it, is that we have to eat. We have to put food on a table. Food is a national security issue in every country. When you look at the issues affecting the Middle East for that matter, it's all about how you can provide that. And going back to what I call Mazloff's hierarchy of things is you've got to be able to enable your children or whatnot to have that to then actually do other things like education, et cetera. You're talking about technology and new insights that technology brings forth affecting a really old traditional business, especially here in Hawaii. Especially in Hawaii. And we're making a transition from large scale plantations with sugar and pineapple to a whole different framework of agriculture. So the architecture of agriculture. So you're right in the middle of this transition. Yeah. And I think the neat thing about this is the analogy of the technology piece also plays in the food side of things. When you look at the history of the industrialization of agriculture, moving towards mechanized agriculture that we had back in the 40s, 50s, and whatnot, we started to think of food production on a global scale. And what we see today is actually with logistics, with the improvement of data and information. And then it's also our consumer. We ourselves are demanding higher quality, fresher, local. And we're willing to pay for it. And that's really the big change within this kind of food supply chain. It's weird. And I always bring this up, but how is it today, there are a billion people starving in the world, but yet there are two billion people that are overweight and obese. So really, we actually have a lot of food there. But it's a matter of where that food's grown and where that food ends up. There's a lot of different factors in this whole game. There's also the things that go through my mind. You go to the store and you look at the counter and you get bananas from Chile. Here in Hawaii, which has got to make, Hawaii brews the best bananas around. And yet we, stuff we buy is from not here. So somehow, the logistics system and the reward structure and the continuity of the quality of the produce, this sort of thing, somehow that slipped away from us here and let the large scale producers replace that with their stuff supplied from elsewhere. We're going to go and fix that now. Oh yeah. But you have to get the right solution to go fix that. You have to get the right answer. You have to get something that's appealing to the customer with the right price schedule and such and timing and consistency. So there's a lot of factors here that fit into this optimization equation. And you're going to go help make that happen. We're trying. Other people who want to join you, right? In fact, how do people get a hold of you, Vince? Yeah. Well, we have a website, obviously, SmartYields.com. Okay, SmartYields.com. And that's probably the best way to reach out to us. You know, we're all on Facebook, but we have a very active Facebook feed that our chief marketing officer, Ryan Ozawa, who I know. We already know Ryan, really, yeah. So, you know, he updates that regularly. So we're constantly looking to try to improve this. And there's a bigger play here besides just, you know, working with farmers too. There's the education piece, right? It's how can we empower and make this tool, you know, just as much as you learning how to use Google Docs, you know, today, or using iPads and whatnot. Students today need to be utilizing data science tools that marry in indoor growing or outdoor growing. If I can suggest, there's probably also the retail side or the wholesale side of this that has to be adjusted. I just, I don't recall what made me think of it, but I went to one of the large big box suppliers around here and said, how come you guys aren't buying anything local? And the answer was, this is probably seven years ago. So the answer was, the quality is variable. The irrigation is by rain and rainfall. It's not consistent, can't be counted on. So material may or may not show up on a given day. And the quality may change from day to day. And the small farmers markets are such, that doesn't seem to bother them much because the customers are okay with that. But in the large retail grocery outlets, it's got to look the same and be the same, be on the same table, same exact amount, day after day. So part of what your optimization is going to be on is going to have to be on the issue of that issue of quality and sufficiency and consistency or reeducate the public to say that's not the thing that you necessarily need to optimize on. Maybe quality is a better thing. Maybe nutrition value is a better thing. So there's a whole lot of stuff. And you're in the middle of all this, which is the interesting part. Oh, it's great though. How did you get started in this sense? Yeah. So I started working with farmers specifically on food safety, food safety control, and our farmers are amazing here. And I think coming from the tech industry, working for some of the big consulting companies that work for KPMG and whatnot, I got to see a lot of the best practices. And I got to see how really you can have the greatest technology in the world. But if the end user doesn't believe in it or doesn't understand it, it'll never work. And I think working with agriculture specifically has been a humbling experience. And it's been so enjoyable. I've been blessed to have some great mentors in the industry who've really kind of opened my eyes to that. And there's nothing better than growing up on a farm and chatting with farmers and hopefully finding a solution that can help them using technology. And I would say every single time I walk away, they kind of give you some omiage, right? Some whatever they have that they've been producing. So greatest people on earth. That's great. You know, I was at the agricultural today at the capital bank about a couple of months ago, thank you very much. And I was walking around there and I was kind of struck by the inability to readily discern where the center of agricultural thinking was. There was a lot of, the Department of Agriculture had many booths and the university had many booths and there was a lot of many booths around. But there wasn't like a place where, this is where, this is the Eiffel Tower of Agriculture, the center of it all, the Pentagon of Agriculture. And you must be seeing that as well. They get quite a distribution. Different islands have different concepts and different things they grow. So optimization as you're thinking about, and in fact we need to talk about what smart yields is actually going to do, what the product looks like and how somebody can access it and make it useful to them. You got to deal with all this variation. Yeah. You know, it's interesting because we just deal with data. That's what we wanted to do. We saw early on that there's a lot of data out there. So the common denominator is data. Absolutely. Okay. And you're going to process that data, operate on it and turn it from data into information. Yes. We call it insights. Insights. Yeah, it's not, no more information. No more insights. No. Okay. You know, we learned early on in our process and you know, when you look at some of the other folks that are trying to do this as well. And you know, we, I like to say this, especially from a competitive landscape is that, you know, it's a huge market. You know, there's 570 million farmers in the world. You know, in the United States we have 2.1 million farmers. Hawaii 7,000 registered farms. But beyond that too, when you look at the home gardeners or what not that are trying to grow is, you know, again this change in this, from this global to a regional to an uber local landscape of food production. And the big thing that we realize is that we need, we need to share information, right? There's a knowledge transfer piece, right? We need to build trust within each other. We need to tackle this food security, food stability issue that you mentioned, you know, on a, on a, on that scale together. And so with all that data that's out there, we want to move our data together, right? So we want to bridge it in there so now everyone can see that we can share it, right? So, you know, Farmer Joe and Farmer, you know, Tom, next to each other, you know, they can still be at ease, right? With knowing that, hey, we're, we're, we're, quote, unquote, next to each other, we might be doing the same thing, but we can still utilize the data that would add benefit. And what I, what I, what I mentioned that is, for example, pests, you know, pest tracking, that's a big issue that every farmer deals with around the world. You know, we, we start looking at community data points, right? We start figuring out what are the, the factors that cause bugs or beetles or thrips or whatever to move or migrate. And that's the information we need to head them off of the past. That's cool. Now what you're speaking of is, is a data rich, but insight oriented extraction scheme of some kind, an illustration scheme, an expression scheme, and optimizations and such. But the way you're describing this, Vince, this isn't limited to Hawaii. This may be a Hawaii product that you're creating, but it's useful anywhere where there's data that can define the process. Yeah, we've been very, very humbled and lucky. So the government of Hong Kong has actually invested in this as well. So they've created a grant program out of the innovation incubation program they have there to do some proof of concept pilot programs out there. We see Asia and China specifically as, as a big game changer, because a lot of the food production there. China itself has almost 3 million hectares of greenhouse. It's more than anywhere else in the world combined, you know? So it's, it's a combination. It's a really complicated issue. The biggest challenge with small or large farmers is how they can reduce two things. One is their labor costs. And two is their energy usage, you know? And I use energy also to include other, other inputs, right? So those two things, labor cost and energy usage, that's interesting. Those are items you would like to reduce, obviously. And those are somehow related to the product and the, and the quality of the product and the, the consistency of it, this sort of thing. But you focused on things that they can see directly right in front of them, their costs. And that's interesting because that's a, there's an assumed connection then between the cost reduction, but we're still holding on to the quality here. So at some point in time, increasing the quality or increasing the consistency would be secondary factors that want to be added in here, which could become primary at some point in time. Yeah, the biggest challenge we have today is there's no baseline. There's no baseline. Baseline, yeah. So you need to be able to compare that information, you know, with that. What are we seeing here? This is actually our, our website. So I, I'm going to announce it today, Ted, because it's on the show, but we are formally launching our, our basically product. So this is our old website. And next week at the energy accelerator program, the interactive week, we're launching our, our formal. So to be a new website, we'll have a short video, or something externally launched on our beta. Yeah, yeah, we haven't mentioned anything yet. So this is, this is ground-baking stuff. So we're going to be launching 2000 beta users out there, you know. 2000. 2000. In Hawaii, all over the country. So we've got a really great mix between education folks. So we, I don't know if you've noticed, but we actually are working with, you know, the next future growers and scientists and, and innovators of our time. And that, that starts, you know, right in the classroom. So the, the insights and, and really the simplicity of things, that's what we need to do, right? We need to make something that's not, that's easy to use, right? That's, it's, it's, uh. An application on your cell phone. Yes, absolutely. And also something that has lasting value and can adapt to change as time goes on. In fact, I was, I mean, when you were talking about this, it looks like that the data analytics are the core of the functionality. And the sensors can come and go and change. The UABs, if they're involved, can come and go and change. The products can come and go and change. But the analytics, it processes all that and looks at the optimization and applies the algorithms and such. That's the fixed part that continues on forever. And it's interesting, in this game here of Unmanned Air Systems Drones, which you said to the sixth time now, that's the same sort of thing. The big picture on the future of business here isn't in the drone itself. It's in the software that does the analytics. It's in the counter drone, which means preventing somebody from using it wrongly. And the third piece is the, the analytic products that, that is produced. And that includes training. So nowhere in there is the unit itself. The thing we focus on, the major part of the future of the economics. And I think you're seeing the same thing over where you are. The exact same thing. It's all about education. And that starts at the, at first grade, I'm sure. But let's, and that's the same thing here. There's a lot of commonality here, basically, in what you're doing and what we're attempting to accomplish here. I think you guys are ahead of us. But let's, let's pick up after the break here. We've got to take a one minute break. But let's pick up and talk about what somebody will get when they talk to you and how their, how the application will work, what kind of data it takes to make it happen, and what actions it'll take as a result of something coming out of smart yields. That's what I'm going to point out. Okay, right after our break. My name is Calvin Griffin, host of Military in Hawaii, which airs here on Think Tech Hawaii every Friday at 11 a.m. Please join us. We'll be talking about issues concerning our military, veterans' community, and other related issues that concern all of us. Aloha. You can join the Hawaii Farmer Series every Thursday from four to five on Think Tech. And I'm your co-host, Matthew Johnson, here with Justine Espirito. And we are so thankful to have this show to use as a forum to get to know all the movers and shakers in agriculture in Hawaii. And hear kind of their background and history as well as. Their perspective on what they're doing and also the future for agriculture in Hawaii. So join us every Thursday. You can tweet in your own comments and suggestions and be a part of the conversation at Think Tech High. And we hope to see you every single Thursday. It is Thursday afternoon, folks. Ted Rawlson here, hosting the second half of our show where the drone leads with a visitor first-timer on this show, but not a last-timer. Mr. Vincent Kimura, Vince of CEO and founder of Smart Eels LLC. Oh, no, Incorporated. Here in Honolulu. And what a fascinating conversation. There's so many dimensions to it we had before the break. It's hard to kind of push your arms around it. Such an interesting issue you're dealing with. That is the data management leading to optimization of farming from a systems engineering perspective, if you will. So we're going to have a launch next week of your application, which is a cell phone app of some kind that somebody can get a subscription to, or they can somehow associate you. What do they do? Once they have this cell phone in their hand with this app loaded, what does the farmer do? Let's take a guy on a 10-acre truck farm somewhere and let them out. Yeah. That's a great question. And I think that was part of the biggest challenge we were building up to in this kind of new, young startup that we have going into 15 months here. And figuring out who the end user is, what their pain points are. And there are a lot of pain points in agriculture. So as we've evolved through this, and I kind of fondly call this our third iteration, but as we've learning, we're figuring out the archetypes. We're figuring out who the end user is. And really, it's the gal or the guy on the field, scout on the field. It's the information that they see, hear, touch, smell. That's the information we need to capture. So utilizing hardware sensors or integrating data from drones or satellite imagery, that's just a piece of the picture. So it's really the, as we like to call it, the event management based on the data, why things go up or down or maintain. And the changes of that to then figure out how we can better improve productivity. But expressed at the level of that person who is sitting out there in the truck at the front with the equipment and the tools and is the one facing the reality. So that person helps you collect information and also then receives back guidance on what to do. Is that how this all works? Yeah. So I mean, it can be anything related to potential risks or factors. And I think that's really been the core around talking to farmers and growers about what do they need, making, how to make their day or their operations more efficient and smart, right? So it's not a matter of if but when things break or we have, you know, boars come in or we have issues or theft or whatnot. So right now we're issue rich. We're issue rich. And solution like, right? And so you're gonna go put that together, the cause and effect and that coupling. And then in the middle of that, you must have incredible algorithms that look at humidity and temperature and water content in the soil and nature of the chemical enhancement and such and the point in the crop growth. All that must be modeled in some ways. Yeah, I mean, again, you know, I'm not about reinventing the wheel here, you know, we're all about leveraging what's been done, how to improve it, how it can take other applications, other industries, other technologies from other sectors and apply that to the, again, the oldest inch in the world. So, you know, we're really grateful to have some really amazing folks on our team, you know. You know, you just said something that made me think as we deal with the other applications of drones here, we find that those of us inside the business think that we have to go to the most extreme, exotic answer or analysis or product. But in fact, most people who are not users of, we'll say, drones today are happy with the first level of improvement because it's something they haven't ever seen before. That first level of utility changes their whole function and improves it. They don't have to get all the way to the very end of the, we had an example in the Philippines of looking at a Burndaw building after the Yolanda Hurricane, our tycoon and expressed the three-dimensional aspect so that Burndaw building, so people could figure access and where the debris is and this sort of thing, but looking at the, you can fly through it and all this fancy stuff. They said, you know, that's like way too fancy. We just need a picture. You don't need a really complicated analysis which took you 20 minutes to do. Can you just give me a picture? So, you're kind of starting at that same point. Just give me a picture. Tell me what I should do next based on this information I've got. Yeah, you know, it's interesting, you know, from a design thinking perspective too. It's, we always seem to have the answers and going back to the end user, you know, what do they really want? You know, is the solution. We had an answer to the question we asked, not the question they asked. Yeah, what is the right question, right? So, you know, the application of drones into agriculture is a no-brainer. We know it, it's the future. It has to be, right? When you look at productivity and labor and serving and information like that, you know, we see it as a huge solution, right? It's not just the serving. It's not just the imagery. It's the integration for, you know, for example, fertilizer application or even pesticide application. You know, it's the integration for logistics and I think that's really the big thing too. You know, we're, we've been chatting with this one company where we're signing basically an MOU with this group called SkyLift Global and they're very innovative folks out of Colorado and luckily the CEO is a Thunderbird buddy of mine MBA program and they've got a really fascinating drone concept that they've done is they've converted the typical quadcopter idea to more of a helicopter idea and you know, they right now today have a one-to-one ratio so a 100-pound drone can have the 100-pound payload which is impressive. The kicker... 100 pounds is a lot of payload. It's a lot, yeah. I'm gonna put my kids on there. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, you know. And, you know, we see this, this application go beyond everything, right? I mean, it's gotta be, right? I can see this image where, you know, folks are on the field, you know, on Kauai or whatever and they're harvesting and they have an area where the drone comes in. You put the, you put the harvest there. It doesn't sit in the hot sun, which is a big issue for food safety, right? And you have it automatically go back and forth and the kicker on this thing compared to the other drones that are out there is this is purely electric, right? I mean, it's, it's, you add, you know, renewable energy. I mean, you know, basically... No fire hazard. Yeah, there's no fire hazard. There's, you know, it's great. I mean, it's, it's, it's so cheap and expensive to operate. To me, you know, that's a very interesting point you made about quadcopter versus helicopter versus fixed wing. And that's, that's really something that the industry is going to have to work on from the technology perspective because this stuff all came either from downscaling, manned aircraft, which are typically fixed wing or single rotor helicopters or came up from the model airplane business and it just got there. It didn't really optimize its weight unlike what you're doing in the crop production area. So this is a picture here, of course, of a quad rotor that are some kind of, I guess a quad, I guess of some kind. But the interesting thing is fixed wing like this is about five times more efficient for battery charge than is a, than is a rotor borne system. But this can't be any other way because rotor borne is just an expensive way to hold the weight whereas on a, on a, you need one to one thrust to weight ratio or more on a quadcopter. You need maybe five, one fifth of the weight in terms of thrust on something like this. It's a much more efficient system. You get the wings carrying the load, not the rotor. But you have to launch and land it in a complicated environment whereas a helicopter can go straight up and down. What's coming is the world of hybrids where you have both the functionality of the fixed wing for the long duration and the high performance and then they convert to a quadcopter or a tricopter of some form of vertical lift for the ascent and the descent. So you can get them into a small place and get them out. So you think of one monologue for a minute. We were talking about Kevin the other day. I get people confused here. And one monologue is 2,800 acres, more or less, the farm area. And it must be 100 different people in there, I would think, in that range. So they're all gonna have different things. They're all little microclimates. Some are up against the co-allow, some are closer to the ocean. So there's a lot of variation. One monologue is a perfect test place for this functionality. In fact, something like this, either a hybrid or a fixed wing like this, could probably cover one monologue in a day, in terms of a collection. And then 10 days later, do it again, whatever the update rate might be. And then the issues of how the information's used, how you separate information from various people and get the right information to the right guy. You don't wanna have my information provided to you, necessarily. So there's a lot of issues of workflow management that come into the picture if we were to think of one monologue. It would be a perfect place to think of a controlled test. And it's also got some serious wind conditions up against the co-allows of water turbines. And so I think that that's a great place to think of a project of some kind. How do we do that? How do we grab one monologue? You know, it's really gotta be this almost public-private partnership, you know? I mean, no matter what you do, especially integration of technology like this, especially with drones or UAVs, you know, you have a lot of folks that are really worried about someone else living with information. So, you know, those parameters that you always kind of set have to be defined. And then I think, you know, going back to the security or the data piece of it, you know, it really is, you can't just show all the data to everyone. No, you can't. So there has to be a third party or whatnot who fits the right mold of showing just the data that they are relevant and appropriate to see. And everything else is kind of grayed off. But the data needs to be joined and supporting everyone with the community. For example, if it's a bunchy-top banana virus or something like that that blows with the wind, it doesn't make any difference. Who's got boundaries around their property, the bunchy-top banana virus goes where the wind takes it to. And that's, so there's an example of a shared item that does have preparatory information control aspects because the DBTV could affect one parcel more than the other. So there's, how would we grab the farmers in Guamanalo all and start thinking about this? Yeah. Well, you know, I think from my perspective to doing a successful pilot or a proof of concept for that matter for this kind of environment is really, you've got to get key stakeholders involved. You've got to bring everyone to the table. You've got to agree to those terms. Smart yield is the place they all come together. Yeah. Isn't that right? We'd love to make that marketplace. You're the common denominator here. Okay, that's cool. So that would be a reason for coming together. Whereas if you were dealing with, if you're a fertilizer provider or something, that may be too preparatory and too commercial-interested. But you're the generalist. You sit on top of all of it, regardless of what the guy grows or where his location is, what his market is, you can attend to his needs. So smart yield at the middle of this, Guamanalo, Ahupo, sharing of some kind, and Poybol, perfect model. So we get to people, we know the people, right? We need to, maybe the next year, spend that time getting it all together and coming up with all the privacy control issues and all the preparatory information issues and think of that. And then the public-private partnership working behind it. Yeah, I agree. Okay, wow. We can do that in Guamanalo. And what a great place to take that leadership. It's a great area. The farmers there are so passionate. They're amazing individuals. And obviously you're a resident there too, so. It's near and dear to your home. So once again, people can get ahold of you to talk more about this or to be part of it. This partnership we're speaking of here through your phone number and your website. Yeah, please send us an email via our website. There we are, okay. A message on Facebook, we're on Twitter. So we're on all the social media channels. Okay, and we gotta get you back on the show again as progressively as this thing develops. Okay, let's learn, let's share this information. This is not, we've gotta do a darn good job of kind of getting everyone on board. And you're not alone. I mean, the public safety people are in the same exact situation you are. There's a lot of value, a lot of concern. It's gotta be done right, and everybody's gotta be part of it. So you take care of the agricultural optimization. They take care of fire prevention optimization or law enforcement optimization or coastal erosion issues. So, but it's a very similar process all the way around. Yeah. But this one has, the agriculture certainly has something that is daily important to us, the food we eat. Right? Right here in Hawaii. So Vince Kamuro, thanks for coming on our show, man. Thanks for having me, Ted. Appreciate that very much for what you do in here. Boy, I wish I could give up as you guys, okay?