 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 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California at the Food IT show. About 350 people from academe, from food producer, somebody came all the way from New Zealand for this show to a lot of tech, big companies and startups talking about applying IT to food, everything from ag to consumption to your home kitchen to what do you do with the scraps that we all throw away. And we're excited now to get to the big brain segment. We've got our PhDs on here. We're excited to have Dr. Glinda Cumiston. She's the VP, Agriculture and Natural Resources for the University of California, welcome. And also Dr. Helene Dillard. She's the Dean of the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at UC Davis. Welcome. Thank you. We were talking a little bit before we turned the cameras on. Neither of you have been to this event before. Just kind of your impressions of the event in general. I love seeing the mix of the folks here. As you were saying in your intro there, there's quite a diverse array of people. And I personally believe that's what's really going to help us find solutions moving forward, that cross-pollination. And I've enjoyed it just seeing all the different people that are here, but then the interaction with the audience was very uniquely done. And I just think that's a real big positive for the show. So you guys were on a panel earlier today. And I thought one of the really interesting topics that came up on that panel was, what is good tech? You know, everybody wants it all, but unfortunately there's no free lunch, right? Something we all learned as kids. There's always a trade-off. And so people want perfect, organic, this free, that free, cage free. At the same time they want it to look beautiful, be economical and delivered to their door and Amazon Prime within two hours. So it's interesting when we think of the trade-offs that we have to make in the food industry to kind of hit all these pieces, or can we hit all these pieces? Or how else stuff could prioritize? Well, I think for us, it's going to be a balance. And trying to figure out how do you provide the needs for all these different audiences and all the different things that they want. And I don't think one farmer can do it for all these different groups that have different demands on what they're looking for. And some of the trade-offs could be as we go away from pesticides and some other things, we might have more blemishes. And those are still edible pieces of fruit and vegetables. It's just that maybe it's curly, maybe the carrot's not straight, maybe it's forked, but it's still very edible. And so I think that we have to do a lot more to help educate consumers, help people understand that it doesn't have to look perfect to give you perfect nutrition. Right, right. Yeah, Helene's absolutely right. Some of it's just education, but some of it's also us finding the new technology that is acceptable to the public. Part of the problem is we sometimes have researchers working on their own, trying to find the best solution to a problem. And we're not socializing that with the public as we're moving forward. So then all of a sudden, here's some new type of technology and they're like, where did this come from? What does it mean to me? Do I need to worry about it? And that's one reason we talked earlier on the panel too about the need to really engage more of our citizens in the scientific process itself. And really start dealing with that scientific illiteracy that's out there. Because there's a lot of talk about transparency in the conversation earlier today about what is transparency? Because you always think about people complaining about genetically modified foods. Well, what is genetically modified? All you have to do is look at the picture of the first apple ever. And it was a tiny little nasty lick of thing that nobody would want to eat compared to what we see at the grocery store today. A different type of genetic modification, but still you don't plant the ugly one and you plant the ones that are bigger and have more fruit, guess what? The next brown has more fruit. So it does seem like a big education problem. It is. And yet for the average human being out there, all you have to do is look at a Chihuahua next to a St. Bernard. None of that was done with the genetically modified technology. Right, right. And yet people just they forget that we've been doing this for thousands of years, literally. You talked about, Glenda, the vine earlier on in the panel. What is the vine? What's the vine all about? Well, it's brand new. It's still getting rolled out. In fact, we announced it today. It's the Verdi Innovation Network for Entrepreneurship. You know, you got to think of a clever way to get that acronym in there. Which comes first, the chicken or the egg. Basically, it's our attempt from University of California to catalyze regional innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystems. Part of what's driving that is, we've got a fairly good amount of resources scattered around the state, even in some of our rural areas, on small business development centers, our community colleges, our county cooperative extension offices, and a host of other resources, including lately, the last several years, incubators, accelerators, makers labs. But they don't talk to each other. They don't work together. So we're trying to go in region by region and catalyze a coalition so that we can make sure that our innovators, our inventors out there, are able to go from idea to commercialization with all the support they need. Be it, you know, just basic legal advice on do, should they be patenting something? Right. Access to people to discuss finances. Access to people that can help them with business plans. Opportunities to partner with the university and joint research projects. But whatever it takes, make sure that for anybody in California, they can access that type of support. So it's interesting. Obviously at Haas and at Stanford, not far from here, you know, a lot of the technology success companies come out of, you know, kind of an entrepreneurial spin with a business-focused grad and often a tech grad in the tech world, and you know, ton of stuff at Berkeley on that. Yeah, but those folks are in urban areas. Yeah, if you're in a large urban area or you're near a major campus, you've probably got access to most of that. If you're in agriculture, natural resources, and particular are more remote rural communities, you typically have no access or very little. Right, right. So beg the question, Helene, so you're a Davis, right? Obviously known as one of the top agricultural focused schools, certainly in the UC system, if not in the world. I mean, how is the role of academic institutions evolving in this space as we move forward? I would say it's evolving in that we're getting more entrepreneurship on campus. So professors are being encouraged to look at what they're working on and see if there's patent potential for this. And also we have a group on UC Davis, kind of it's called Innovation Access, but looking at how can they access this population of people with money and you know, the startups to help them bring their thing to market. So that's becoming, that's a very different campus than years ago. I think the other thing is we're also encouraging our students to look at innovation. And so we have a competition called the Big Bang and students participate in that, they do hackathons, they do all these kinds of things that we only, we tend to think that only the adults are doing those, but now the students are doing them as well. And so we're trying to push that entrepreneur spirit out into all of our campus, everyone on the campus. And I do want to emphasize that this isn't just for our students or our faculty. One of the key focuses of the vine is all of our external partners too. Just the farmers, the landowners, the average citizens we're working with out there. If they've got a great idea, we'd like to help them. Right. And what's nice about tech is, tech is a vehicle that you can't change the world without having a big company. And I would imagine an ag has this kind of big, big ag rolled up a lot of the smaller, mid-sized things that probably didn't feel like there was an opportunity that you could have a huge impact. But as we know, sitting across the street from Google, that via software and technology, you can have a huge impact far beyond kind of the size and scope of your company. So I would imagine this is a theme that you guys are playing off pretty aggressively. Absolutely. And I think there are people on campus that are looking for small farm answers in mechanization as well as large farm answers. We have people that are working overseas in developing countries with really, really small farm answers. And then we have people that are working with the Driscoll's in partnering up with some of these other big companies. We talked a little bit before we went on air about kind of the challenges of academic institutions in terms of resources and scale, because these are big, complicated problems. I mean, obviously water is kind of the elephant in the room at this conference. It's not being talked about specifically. I think they've had other water shows and just drive up and down the valley by Turlock and Merced and you see the big signs. We want the water for the farms, not for the salmon in the stream. So we're the environmental impact. So these are big, hairy problems. These are not simple solutions. So it does take a lot of kind of the systems approach to think through what are the trade-offs? Again, there's no free lunch. It really does take a systems approach. And that's one thing here in California. We're doing some very innovative work on. A great example that both UC Davis, my division and other parts of the UC system are working on is Central Valley, Ag Plus Food and Beverage Manufacturing Consortium, which is 28 counties, the Central Valley and up into the Sierra. And what's exciting about it is it is taking that holistic approach. It's looking at bringing around the table the folks from research and development, workforce, trained workforce, adequate infrastructure, financing, access to capital, supply chain infrastructure, and having them actually work together to design what's needed and leverage each other's resources. And I think that offers a lot of possibility moving forward. And I would say that at least in our college, and I would call the whole UC Davis, there's a lot of integration of that agriculture environmental space. So we've been working with the rice farmers on when could you flood the rice fields so that there's landing places for the migrating birds? Because this is the Pacific Flyway. And how can we grow baby cell monids in that rice water and then put them back in the bay? And they figured out a way to do that. And have it actually be like a fish hatchery, only even better because we're not feeding them little tiny pellets, they're actually eating real food, whole foods. So how has kind of the evolution changed from, and we see it again, this is no different than any place else, from kind of the old school intuition, the way we've always done it, versus really more of a data-driven scientific approach where people are starting to realize there's a lot of data out there, we've got all this cool technology with sensors and cloud and edge computing and drones and a whole lot of ways to collect data in ways that we couldn't do before, to analyze it in ways that we couldn't do before, to start to change behavior, be more data-driven as opposed to kind of intuition driven. I would say what we're seeing is that as this data starts to come in, precision gets better. And so now that we understand that this corner of the field needs more water than the other side, we don't have to flood the whole thing all at once. You can start on the dry side and work over to the other side. So I think that the precision is getting much, much better. And so with that precision comes water efficiency, chemical efficiencies. So to me, it's just getting better every time. And frankly, we're just at the beginning of that. Right. We're just starting to really use drones extensively to gather that type of data. New ways of using satellite imagery, new ways of using soil sensors. But one of the problems, one of the big challenges we have back to infrastructure is in many parts of your agricultural areas, access to the internet. You know, that pipeline, broadband. If you've got thousands of sensors zapping information back and forth, you fill up that pipeline pretty fast. It becomes a problem. At pesky soft underbelly of cloud, right? You got to be connected to that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, all right, well, we're out of time, unfortunately. Want to give you the last word, you know, for people that aren't as familiar with the space and new to it, myself included, now what would you like to share with people that they kind of raise their awareness of what's happening with technology and agriculture? Well, I guess I would start off by saying that not to be afraid of it and to look at the technology that has come, remember when we had the rotary dial phone? You know, my son doesn't even know what that is. Come on, why don't we say dial them up? And why do you say dial people up? So I think, you know, looking at your rotary phone and now looking at your smart phone which has more computing power than your first Macintosh did. You know, so it's just, the world is changing and why do we expect agriculture to stay in the 1800s mindset? It's moving to and it's growing to and it's getting better just like that iPhone that you have in your hand. I think I would add to that back to the citizen science. I would love people out there, anybody, average citizens, young or old, to know that there's opportunities for them to engage. If they're concerned about the science or the technology, come work with us. We have over 20,000 volunteers in our programs right now. We will happily take more and they'll have a chance to see up close and personal what this technology is and what it can do for them. All right, well that's great advice. We're going to leave it there and Dr. Humason, Dr. Diller, thank you for taking a few minutes out of your day. Thank you. Thank you. All right, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. We're at the Computer History Museum Food IT learning all about the IT transformation in the agriculture industry, also to the kitchen, your kitchen, the kitchen, the local restaurant and all the stuff that happens with those scraps that we throw away at the end of the day. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back after this short break.