Name: Big Data and the Future of Food
Uploaded: 2018-03-19
Duration: 4 min 42 s
Description: SENSEI’s Daniel Gruneberg explains the future of agriculture.

Agriculture has been slow to embrace new technology. But now, with more and more technology being out there and more accessible than ever, it's time for agriculture to go high tech. Or even more high tech, I should say. There are now hundreds of companies offering everything from farm management, precision tools, to bots. And drones into the space. Here to show how big data can revolutionize our food production, please welcome the president of SENSEI, Daniel Gruneberg. [ APPLAUSE ] Hello everybody, my name is Daniel Gruneberg and a few years ago, a number of things happened to me at once. I hit a milestone birthday. Then later that week I stepped on the scale and saw that I was the highest weight I'd ever been by a large margin. Thank you. And that same week I got a call that my father was being rushed to the emergency room to get a quadruple bypass surgery. Now thankfully my father recovered, but it was definitely one of those moments where you stop and you reflect and you think about your lifestyle decisions, because apparently all the good habits I had went by the wayside being an entrepreneur. So I took next year, I started tracking everything. Anything I did. What I was eating, when I was eating, what my heart rate was doing throughout the day. I tried everything I could with the tools that I had. Now is all relatively low- tech. But the process help me generate an appreciation for using data to make smarter decision around my personal well- being. So fast forward to today besides being 40 pounds lighter, I am now part of the company that shares this belief. I'm te president of Sensei, which is a new company founded by actually one of the chairs of this event, Dr. David Agis and Larry Ellison. We are guiding you towards greater well being, so we're creating an ecosystem of products and experiences that are all designed around one intention, which is to empower you to grow well. As we like to say, so living longer, healthier lives. And the first place we're starting Is with one of the largest contributors to your overall health, food, by building more modern farms. So before we talk about that, let's step back a second and think about the fact that human beings evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to eat the food that nature made, then we changed the food that nature made. Ever since Gregor Mendel genetically modified a pea in 1856, food really hasn't been the same. We've had generations of farming optimized for yield and jot resistance and pest resistance, but the original nutrition and taste profile went by the wayside. Now, with a growing population trending towards 10 billion people by 2050, the quantity of food available is absolutely really important. It's just not the full picture about what's going on in agriculture today. So, McKinsie put out this study recently, and they said that agriculture is the least digitized industry of all industries. But that's rapidly changing. Last year, there was about $ 3 billion invested in new technology. So now AdTech has been born, and it's top of mind, because it's enabling us to scale farming more sustainably. So that's [ UNKNOWN ] up to. [ COUGH ] Well we are building a global network of [ UNKNOWN ] farms. For those of you who aren't as familiar, a [ UNKNOWN ] farm is one where you go fruits and vegetables directly in water beds with nutrients in a climate controlled enviroment, this can be a greenhouse or a building. And you have sensors and software that can control the environment [ UNKNOWN ] ideal conditions for plants [ UNKNOWN ] Now our first farm is on the island of Lanihau, which is in Hawaii. Now this is a state that imports 85 % of its food, and where on average it takes about ten days for food to get to the islands, so it's degrading that entire time. As part of our mission we are looking to make our operation fully sustainable. So we use about one- tenth of the water, as compared with conventional farming, we use no harmful chemicals. And I'm happy to say that we are partnered with Tesla to provide solar energy at our facilities. But there's a bit more to our farm. So the conversation in hydroponics today has mostly been about nutrition per acre, or yield per acre. So how much yield can we get per square foot? Sensei's focus is different. We focus on nutrition per acre. So, to properly nourish the world, we're collecting and analyzing data on all the fruits and vegetables that go in our facilities then creating a continous feedback loop to then help us better understand how to make food closer to the way nature intended it. And so from Black Trafilly tomatoes the net will grow all the way to Kamat Sutra mustard greens, we'll reproduce the best of the best and then we'll tell you the exact nutritional breakdown at the time of harvest, because we believe that you deserve to know what you're eating. With that said, our door is wide open to collaborate, we're just getting started. And thank you so much. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

SENSEI’s Daniel Gruneberg explains the future of agriculture.