(Exciting Techno Music) >> Live
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 to theCUBE.
We are live at the fourth annual food IT Fork to Farm Event.
I am Lisa Martin with my Co-Host Jeff Frick.
Jeff, this is a really interesting event.
The first time we've been here with The Cube,
and one of the first things I said to you this morning was
"Fork to Farm - we always kind of think of it as
"farm to fork, right, farm to table."
But it's really interesting mix of investors here,
people that are very educated in food and agriculture
and one of the things they're focused on is
connecting people who are feeding the world,
billions and billions of people, with the people who are
changing the world through technologies.
And nowadays we're all this tech enabled food consumer
which has really flipped farm to fork from fork to farm
which I found really interesting.
>> It's pretty interesting, our first kickoff call
with Michael Rose from The Mixing Bowl
and we were talking about the Conference.
I'm like, "Michael didn't you get that mixed up?
"Isn't it supposed to be Farm to Fork?"
But as you said it's really now the tech enabled consumer
and what they want to eat, like everything else,
is being so consumer driven that we see in our other shows
is driving now what the food producers have to create.
And what's interesting is
they don't necessarily think of all the ramifications
of those decisions upstream and downstream.
And so that's a big topic of the theme here.
The other thing that struck me is some of the sponsors:
Yamaha is here >> Yes.
>> And one of the main sponsors.
Google is here as one of the main sponsors.
And we just had one of the opening keynotes
from one of the guys from Google
talking about how they've taken
really just the task of feeding the employees
to a much greater responsibility
in both what people eat, how it gets produced,
and really more sustainable longterm food
kind of as a circle he called it.
So it's pretty interesting, I'm excited.
We've got Deans from a lot of big schools,
we've got, of course, like I said, Yamaha.
I'm really curious to find out
what they're doing in this space.
And it's fun to get, you know,
out of the tech infrastructure space
to see what's really happening on the front lines.
I really want to get into edge computing,
I really want to get into cloud, data, you know,
all of the themes that we follow
over and over and over again,
but now a real specific application.
And doing some of the research, you know,
we have to feed 10 billion people in just a couple years
and we're not growing any more land.
So how are those challenges being addressed with technology?
How are cloud, mobile, data helping solve those problems?
And then how are the consumer driven prioritization
impacting all of this?
So it should be a great day.
>> Absolutely, like you said, a great spectrum
of guests on the show today.
And we think of food and agriculture
as one of the largest industries globally
and as you said, there's a daunting responsibility
feeding billions of people in a very short period of time.
Having to deal with environmental sustainability,
we're going to be talking about that on the program today,
climate change, and also the consumer.
But there's tremendous potential for
big data and IOT and analytics
to improve farming efficiencies
from planting to weeding to fertilizing
to the post-harvest supply chain logistics, traceability.
There's, you know, opportunities
for GPS sensors on tractors and columbines,
as well as robotics and automation.
We're going to be talking to a guy, the CEO Chell Botics,
who invented Sally, a robot that makes salads.
So there's a tremendous amount of opportunity
and I'm really curious to see how these,
from the University Folks, the Deans, to the investors,
how Venture Capital is really seeing big data
as revolutionary, the potential to be revolutionary,
for the entire food supply, the food chain.
>> Right, right.
And another topic that's come up is really
transparency and enabling consumers to see kind of
where their food comes from, how it was raised,
but as come up again in one of the earlier Keynotes,
there's no perfect solution, right?
There's always trade offs.
So how are people creating values,
making trade offs based on those values,
and how are the food producers now being able
to deliver to those values?
So it should be, like I said, a fantastic day.
We're going to go wall to wall.
We'll be here till 5 o'clock today, full slate of guests,
a lot of two guests, so we're going to pack them in.
And it should be fantastic. >> Absolutely, I'm excited.
>> Alright. >> A lot of great topics.
>> So she's Lisa Martin, I'm Jeff Frick,
you're watching theCUBE from Food IT: from Fork to Farm.
We'll be right back with our first guest
after this short break.
Thanks for watching.