 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. We are at the fourth annual Food IT Fork to Farm event at the Computer History Museum. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Jeff for very excited to welcome our next guest, Paul Noglos, who is the executive producer of the Forbes Ag Tech Summit. Paul, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So, we are in the heart of Silicon Valley right now, but you are the creator of the Forbes Ag Tech Summit, which happens tomorrow, June 28th and 29th, in Salinas, the salad bowl of America. Talk to us about this event that you created. What was the genesis of it, and why Salinas? We were doing a series at Forbes in 2014 called Reinventing America, and we were going around cities, mostly in the Midwest, but we were looking at industries that were really reinventing themselves and remaking themselves. So, we focused on advanced manufacturing in Chicago, we focused on healthcare in Indianapolis, then we went up to Detroit, and we focused on reinventing the workforce. So, we did a series of five shows over 15 months, and the last one, we thought we were going to reinvent the farm, and we thought we were going to do it somewhere in the Midwest, but we got a proposal from the city of Salinas, and they said, why don't you come out and see what we've got here? And it's the salad bowl of the world, and I knew Monterey pretty well from having lived out here, and we used to take our kids down to the Monterey Aquarium, but I never really knew Salinas, or the Salinas Valley. So, I got a tour from the former mayor, Dennis Donahue, and it was just, we were blown away by how much was going on, and really, it's become the epicenter of ag tech innovation, and we're just thrilled at Forbes that we were able to be part of that, and to support it, and the summit has grown dramatically over the three years, and so we're really looking forward to a terrific show. Tell us about the growth that you've achieved in this summit, the opportunities, the types of people that are there, and what they're going to be able to see and discuss. Yeah, and we started out with about 400 participants in the summer of 2015. We had 20 startups, but it's really mushroomed from there. This year we'll have over 650 participants. We'll have 50 companies in the innovation showcase. We've expanded the field demos and the plant tours to a full day. About a good third of our audience are farmers, and that's really been kind of a secret sauce for us, is that, and we've also, we've priced the summit right. There's a lot of summits out there, and people are starting to get big numbers for an afternoon at the Marriott Marquis. Ours is really different. We've kept the rate low enough so that farmers can participate, and we love to have everyone outside. We do it all under giant, white tent right out in front of the Taylor Building on Main Street in Salinas, and then we also have people out at the local processing plants and in the local fields. We go out to Hartnell's Alasaw campus, and we use the USDA test field. It's interesting, because Salinas has been at the forefront of ag innovation long time ago. It was one of the first refrigerated railcars to try to get fresh lettuce for salad in Chicago. I remember reading about that a number of times. The first couple didn't work very well. Well, no, and it's really amazing, and it's like, it's been such a privilege to deal with folks like Bruce Taylor, and it was Bruce's father and grandfather, you know, who really, they were the pioneers of iceberg lettuce. And so, yeah, the more you get into it, you know, I've gotten really passionate about it and the history and everything else, and, but you know, you see the continuation today, and with the developments. And, you know, even if it's Taylor Farms putting a startup soft robotics, you know, putting them in their processing plant. And this is really the cutting edge of ag tech innovation. So I'm curious, we cover a lot of big tech events, right? Usually more on the infrastructure side. This is really on the application side. So as you look at cloud and edge computing and big data and mobile and some of these big trends, I wonder if you can just highlight some of the ones that really jump out to you that have enabled some of this innovation. Autonomous vehicles, obviously, Gerald, they're seeing so much of it, but now they're putting it to work. Yeah, and I think it's, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, there is so much going on. You know, we look at infield robotics, we look at precision automation, precision agriculture, and you know, the use of big data and the ability to harness that and to really apply it. You know, it's changed a lot of things. It's changed the way we can grow. It's also changing consumers' tastes and what consumers want. And that's a lot of what we're talking about here today. So it really has been revolutionary. I think, you know, we need the industry. We need the industry to really agriculture itself to really get together. I think sometimes there's still, this is looked at as competitive advantage. So what we find interesting is, are we going to move beyond, you know, competitive advantage and what's good for your plant or your farm? You know, is there going to be a collective effort to really start applying this across the agricultural system? One of the interesting things that they talked about this morning in the general session was, and the theme of the event, we're so used to farm to table, farm to fork. And I looked at that and went, fork to farm. The consumer is so empowered, very demanding, right? We want cage free, we want organic, we want hormone free, we want, we've changed the distribution model. How are, but also there's this paradox of the consumer not wanting factory farms. How are farmers, you said quite a bit of your attendees are farmers, how are they embracing this consumer demand with technologies like big data, cloud computing, blockchain? Well, I think it's really the key. It's that, you know, you have different, you have different farmers and different processors. You know, there's a wide spectrum in terms of adoption and in terms of innovation, but they are putting it to work. And that's why there's so much interest in the startups and there's so much interest in how can we do this more efficiently? How can we do this better? I think it used to be that you basically needed a crisis like the E. Coli crisis, you know, for things to really change in the industry. But hopefully we've moved beyond that and that it's not going to take a crisis for folks to really start embracing these new technologies. Because then the other trend that's come up a number of times in kind of doing some background on this show is that there's not only kind of the very inorganic, you know, very specialty demands of the consumer. On the other hand, the population is growing and we've got to feed 10 billion people, I think the number is projected by 2050. There's no new dirt being created last time I checked except in Hawaii, how are the farmers embracing that challenge specifically? Cause it's kind of this bipolar thing. One you want to increase specialization on the other hand, you got to get yields way, way up at massive scale. Well, and that's it. And it's, you know, it really is looking at how do you increase yield? I mean, this is a lot of the interest, you know, this is a lot of the interest in genetics and everything else and looking at the real science of growing. But it's also interesting, you know, and this is a little bit further afield, but like I was talking to Bruce Taylor even about kale, you know, 10 years ago, kale was considered a, you know, a throwaway crop. Right. It wasn't even harvested. And now you look at the impact that kale's having on the American diet. And, you know, so you have a crop that represented really nothing, you know, probably as recently as five years ago. Right. Now it's an important crop. So there's all sorts of innovation. There's all sorts of different ways of looking at things. But I do think, I do think for the most part, I mean, that's the reason we have these things, you know, and we've always been very adamant that, you know, we don't want to get people together to talk about 2050 or, you know, we're not futurists. We're looking at near term solutions to current problems. So what we're really interested in, you know, what does the farm of 2020 look like? Not the farm of 2050. Right, right. As we look at California that's just come out of a severe drought, the event being hosted and the salable of really the world, what are some of the challenges that are really kind of common across farms, across the heartland of America, water, you know, planting and efficiencies and harvesting our supply chain? Are you seeing a lot of commonalities? There are a lot of commonalities. And I think it's a mistake. We actually have a conversation tomorrow. You know, I kind of feel like the assumption is, oh, well all the water problems are over and the water problems aren't over. They may be over for a short period of time, but I am fully convinced that, you know, this is going to be two years ago, this was the topic du jour at our conference. I'd say this year probably the major topic is labor and labor you see having tremendous impact. And across the country. And so you've got the issues of immigration, you've got the issues of a minimum wage that, you know, certain farms are saying, we don't know how we're going to do this. We don't know how we're going to make this work. But the major pressures, things like that, water, labor, those haven't gone away and those haven't been solved, but that's why we're all getting together. That's why we're here today and that's why we're going to be down in Salinas Wednesday and Thursday. And on the labor front, it's that that you talked about, the California minimum wage is going up quite considerably. But it's also things like an aging farming population and you can see value there from a big data perspective, be able to capture, facilitate some automation and derive the next generation of the farmers. And one of the way we're actually going to close our conference on Thursday afternoon is I'm going to moderate a discussion on farmer of the future because we've all heard it. You know, we've all heard it time and time again. The average age of the American farmer, I think it's pushing 70 years old and there's no succession planning and that nobody gets into this business unless they're basically born into it or forced into it in some way. And what we're finding is it's not really true. We're putting up four young farmers who are really making a difference and who are applying innovation to be able to build their farms. And so we think it's actually more hopeful and more interesting than may, you know, in first blush that, yeah. So we do think there is a future for farming and we're determined to explore that to its fullest. That's fantastic. Oh, there'd be a fly on the wall in that conversation. Well, Paul, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE, Mabushi, the best of luck in your third annual Forbes Ag Tech Summit in the salable. We haven't been to Salinas as Paul said, it's worth a drive down there. It's incredible. Roll down the window, take a nice breath in. It's a beautiful place. And again, we wish you the best of luck at that summit and look forward to hearing some other great things that come out of that. Thank you. And we want to thank you for watching theCUBE at the Food IT fork to farm event. I'm Lisa Martin for my co-host, Jeff Frick. Stick around, we'll be right back.