 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. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Silicon Valley at the Computer History Museum, which celebrates history, but we're talking about tech in the food and agricultural space here at the Food IT convention. About 350 people, somebody came all the way from New Zealand, we've got food manufacturers, we've got tech people, we've got big company startups, and we have a lot of representatives from Accadeem, which is always excited to have them on. So our next guest is Dr. Andy Thulin. He's the Dean of the College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, or as slow as we like to call him, welcome. And all the way from Iowa, we have Dr. Wendy Wintersteen. She's the Dean of College of Agricultural and Life Sciences at Iowa State. Welcome. Thank you, it's great to be here. Absolutely, so first off, just kind of your impressions of this event. Small, intimate affair, when actually introduced everyone this morning, which I thought was a pretty interesting thing. Kind of your first impressions. Oh, it's a great environment where you have this mix of technology and a few production people here, but people thinking about the future. And that's always an exciting place to be. And really the environment, having the little set of exhibits where people can go around, visit with entrepreneurs, really a great setting, I think, for the discussion. So Wendy, when you introduced your portion on the panel, you talked about the scale in which Iowa produces a lot of things, pigs and corns and eggs and chickens. And so you've been watching this space for a while. How do you see from your perspective kind of this technology wave as it hits? Is it new, have we just not been paying attention? Those of us have not been paying attention, or is there something different now? Well, I think the speed of adoption, the speed of innovation is increasing clearly, but it's been a long time now that we've had power drive tractors. So the farmers can sit and work on the technology in the cab related to their soil mapping or yield monitors and the tractors driving itself. So we've had that sort of thing in Iowa for a long time, and that continues to be improved upon, but that'd be just one example of what we're seeing. And obviously California has a huge agricultural presence. Again, some people know, some people don't. The valley from top to bottom is something on the over 500 miles of a whole lot of agriculture. So again, is this, do you see things changing? Is this more of the same? Kind of what would you take? No, absolutely changing. I mean California produces some over a little over 400 different products. A lot of them, about a hundred of them lead the country in terms of the marketplace. So there's a lot of technology with the issues of water, lack thereof or cleaning it up or the labor challenges that we have for harvesting products. And it's really turned into quite a challenge. So challenge drives innovation. When you have your back against the wall and you have, for example, in the strawberry fields, I think a year ago they had $800 million worth of labor to produce $2.4 billion with strawberries. When you think about that, that's a lot of labor. When you can't get that labor and you're driving by it, you get $300 million, where they just weren't able to harvest it all because there was nobody to pick them. And so when you think about that, it's a billion dollars. I mean, it's a billion dollars that they couldn't get to. And that drives innovation. So there's a lot of innovation going in these products. Pretty interesting, because obviously the water one jumps out, especially here in California. We had a really wet winter, the reservoirs are full. In fact, they're letting water out of the things. I always say we don't have a water problem, we have a water storage problem. But this came up earlier today. The points of emphasis change, right? The points of pain change and labor came up earlier. The number of people with minimum wage laws and the immigration stuff that's going on. So again, that's a real concern if you got a billion dollars with a strawberry sitting in a field that you can't get to. Yeah, it's a real challenge. And California faces a couple of shortages. We got a water shortage, we got a labor shortage, but we also have a talent shortage. And we were talking this morning about the number of young people going to ag colleges. It's up dramatically and we need all that talent more. I mean, because everyone needs, I mean, all the grain industry, if you will, across the country, all the people that are running these farms and ranches and all, they're getting older. And it's coming back behind them. And it's a technology driven industry today. It's not something that you can just, you know, go up and pick it up and start doing it. It takes talent and science and technology to manage these operations. So it's interesting, there's been science on kind of the genetic engineering, if you will, genetically modified foods for a long time on Santos, always in the newspaper. But I also think it's kind of funny, right? Because we've been genetically modifying our food for a long time. Again, drive up and down I-5 and you see the funny looking walnut trees. They clearly didn't grow that way with a solid base on the bottom and a high yield top. So talk about attitudes about this. And you know, people want it all. They want organic, but they also wanted to look beautiful and perfect, be priced right and delivered from a local farmer. There's no simple solution to these problems, right? There's a lot of trade-offs that people have to make based on value. So I wonder if you could talk about how that's evolving, Wendy, from your point of view. Well, certainly as we think about the products we produce in Iowa, we know that producers are willing to produce whatever the consumer would like. But they really want to be assured they have a market. So right now in Iowa, we have cage-free eggs being produced. And those are being produced because there's a contract with a buyer. And so I think producers are willing to adapt and address different opportunities in the big market, different segments of that market, if they can see that profit opportunity that will allow them to continue in their business. And from the producer's point of view, I mean, the sub theme of this show is fork the farm as opposed to farm to fork, which I think is the logical way. But it's come up and it's been discussed through quite a bit. You know, it's the consumer, again, like they're doing in every business is demanding what they want. They're willing to pay. And they're very specific in what they want. I mean, was this like a sudden wave that hit from the producer point of view? Or is this an opportunity? Is this a challenge? How is that kind of shifting market dynamics impacting the producers? No, I think it's all being driven by technology. I mean, you know, we were talking this morning. I mean, years ago it was the expert, you know, Wendy's of the world there. They had all the knowledge. And then you had all the consumers listening to them and trusting them. Today, you have, as I call it, the mama tribe or the soccer tribe or that sort of thing where they're listening to other parents, other mothers in that group. They're listening to the blogs. They're listening to their friends. That's driving the conversation. And there's less science and technology behind it. And they don't trust. And the transparency thing comes up constantly. So the technology has allowed this just wide open space where now they got so much information, how did they process that? What's real? What's not real in terms of biotech? Or is it this or is it that? Is it wholesome? Is it all these factors? It's funny, because you brought up the transparency earlier today as well. So people know what they're getting. They want to know. They really care. They just don't want to just get whatever generic ABC like they used to. Right. And I think, again, there's a certain segment of the market that is very interested in that and companies are responding. I gave the example of Nestle's. And so you get on their webpage and you can see the ability to scan the code on a particular product and go and get a lot of information about that product back on the webpage of that company. And I think that for certain groups of consumers, that's going to become even more important. And we have to be prepared to meet that demand. So in terms of what's going on at your academic institutions, how is the environment changing? Because of technology, we've got these huge macro trends happening, right? Cloud is a big thing. Edge computing, which is obviously important if you got to get the cloud to the edge of the farm. Sensors, big data, being able to collect all this data. I think somebody earlier said it went from no data to now a flood of data. How are you managing that? Better analytics. And then of course there's fun stuff like drones and some of these other things that can now be applied. How is that working its way into what you're doing in terms of training kind of the next generation of entrepreneurs as well as the traditional farmers in this space? I think first of all, we're seeing a lot more integration between what we do in engineering and what we do in computer science and what we do in agriculture and business. So the overlap and the connection across those disciplines is occurring not just with our faculty, but also with our students. We had a group of students that I would stay before they graduated from the college. Able to start a company called ScoutPro that was based on using technology to help farmers identify pests in the field. And that became a company using the technology to do that. And of course that relied on software development as well as a clear understanding of agronomic and pest management strategies. So I think those integrated approaches are occurring more and more. I think at Cal Poly, our model has been for over 100 years, learned by doing hands-on learning. That's key to us. I mean, as you have a lecture class, you have a lab that goes along with it. So they're forced to. We have over 45 to 50 classes, enterprise classes, where you can come in and you can raise, let's say a marigolds and then you can provide that whole value chain and chain and sell it. You can raise broiler chicks, every quarter for 35 days you can raise them up and, I mean, 7,000 birds and there's teams of students in these classes, they can do it and they manage the whole process. Our winery, for example, it's a bonded winery. They do the whole process. They know how to change the pumps and all that. So it's hands-on, but you take that from there up to where those students go out into the industry. Our university just signed an agreement with Amazon for the cloud. So we're moving the whole complex. Our IT to the cloud through that organization. Is that right or wrong? I don't know, but we've got to do things faster, quicker and just our infrastructure would have cost us millions to do that. But that allows the students, what is it? Apple is only, the iPhone is 10 years old tomorrow. Tomorrow, these kids, that's all they grew up with. So we are constantly having to change our faculty, our leadership teams, constantly have to change to keep up and stay in side by side with the technology. So it's changed. Our Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Cal Poly is a partnership with the community, with the university. It started in the College of Business, and we have a whole floor of a building in downtown, San Luis Obispo, and across the street, we've got 60 apartments for students that are involved in these startups to live there so they can walk across the street and get right engaged. So we're trying to do everything we can. Every university is trying to do everything they can to kind of keep this space flowing and this enthusiasm with these young people. That's where the change is going to occur. Right, right, exciting times. It is exciting. All right, unfortunately we are out of time, so we're going to have to leave it there, but I really want to thank you for stopping by and wish you both safe travels home. Thank you very much. All right, Dr. Thulin, Dr. Winterson, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. It's Food IT in Mountain View, California. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back after this short break.