IFPA Takes on Tech

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Welcome to PMA Takes on Tech. The podcast that explores the problems, solutions, people and ideas that are shaping the future of the produce industry. I'm your host, Vonnie Estes, Vice President of technology for the Produce Marketing Association. And I've spent years in the Ag Tech sector. So I can attest, it's hard to navigate this ever changing world in developing and adopting new solutions to industry problems. Thanks for joining us and for allowing us to serve as your guide to the new world of produce and technology. My goal of the podcast is to outline the problem in the produce industry and then discuss several possible solutions that can be deployed today.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Special thanks to PMA member CropTrack for their sponsorship of our new series of PMA Takes on Tech. CropTrack's cloud platform helps companies digitize their entire supply chain to enable real time visibility at any point. From planting to production. Go to croptrack.com/pma to track what matters.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Our podcast today is about technology transforming business operations. We will do a deep dive with Lipman Family Farms and their process of adopting CropTrack's real time supply chain management. There are a number of companies similar to Lipman and supply chain management companies but we really can't understand the value or the challenges unless we dig deep into a real case scenario. There are pearls of wisdom here that can apply to everyone in the supply chain. We talk to Aaron Hutchinson, President and Co-founder of CropTrack.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
From Lipman we talk to Jamie Marin, Production Operations Analyst and Justin Robertson, Chief Administrative Officer about the incorporation of supply chain management into the Lipman operation. There are so many good nuggets in this conversation about technology adoption. I love the conversation about how the two groups continue to iterate and bring value in leveraging the data. Jamie talks about integrating and iterating with the technology to make sure that the tools fit the needs of the growers and the information is of value.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Let's start with hearing from Aaron Hutchinson.

Aaron Hutchinson, CropTrak:
I'm Aaron Hutchinson, Co-founder and President of CropTrack. I grew up in a small Florida agricultural community. I went to collage in Florida. I did my Navy thing and then joined my partners for our first company which was really focused on military 3D GIS and remote sensing, which we sold in 2005. Using some of those dollars we actually self-financed our second company, CropTrack in 2019. We did a lot of barbecue, a lot of beer and a lot of visiting growers to come up with the defining our mission.

Aaron Hutchinson, CropTrak:
Our mission here is to harness the power of data to address supply chain problems. Limiting the availability of safe, affordable and sustainable food. I think it's ironic that more than 12 years later we are still working on the same problem. And it's much bigger than anybody ever thought it was ever going to be. And to me our mission, CropTrack sells tools, deploys no-code development environments, to digitize our customers' unique supply chains. It allows them to be really efficient and agile, while making it possible to identify problems and opportunities to continue improvement. And those improvements can be in their crops, in their contracts and their sustainability or even in their relationships.

Aaron Hutchinson, CropTrak:
We're doing this in over 60 countries and 8 languages for 70 primarily fresh and high tea crops. And for global 500 kinds of companies and vertically integrated operators. Much like Lipman. We also work forward our mission through leveraging philanthropy. So we also have a goal here of amplifying non-profit organizations with similar goals that we have to help make a larger impact on the food chain. I'm excited to be here today and on this panel we'll talk about the topic.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Thanks a lot Aaron and thanks for your sponsorship of this series on rebuilding resilient, secure and transparent supply chains. So we also have two special guests. Two people from Lipman Family Farms. Justin, why don't you start and tell us about Lipman, yourself and a little about the relationship with CropTrack?

Justin Roberson, Lipman Family Farms:
Yeah, thanks Vonnie. My name is Justin Roberson. I'm the Chief Administrative Officer at Lipman. Part of my role is really to oversee the IT, the tech and the data technology strategy and initiatives for the company. You know Lipman is the nations largest integrated network of local growers, fresh cut processors and distributors. We're a family owned business for over 80 years and are vertically integrated. So from a vertical integration standpoint we have the opportunity to really control of our supply from seed and varietal tool development to farming, to packing and into some value added initiatives in fresh cut processing, repacking and even distribution.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Great thanks. And Jamie, how about you?

Jamie Marin, Lipman Family Farms:
Thanks Vonnie. Thanks for having us on. I actually started off as an intern here at Lipman about 6 years ago. Now I'm a Production Operations Analyst.[crosstalk 00:05:50]

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Lipman's internships really work! How about that?

Jamie Marin, Lipman Family Farms:
I guess they do and so my first project was the implementation of CropTrack. As to that I led the implementation when we decided to do a full scale roll out here at Lipman. That's been part of my role, but within the enterprise my focus is really in deepening our understanding of our data operational to generate and try better decision making.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
So just curious. If someone wanted a cool job like yours, what kind of training did you get? How did you end up with that internship and in this job?

Jamie Marin, Lipman Family Farms:
Yeah so I was asked to apply to the internship but my background is more in the traditional IS sense. So I worked a lot in sequel databases and analytics but now I'm like an effective intermediary between operations and IT. So kind of grow into it sometimes and learn as you go.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Yeah. Yeah great. All right. Justin I understand you're implementing this technology into your platforms and have made some interesting changes to your supply chain management processes. Tell us about the challenges you faces and how data has helped mitigate that challenge.

Justin Roberson, Lipman Family Farms:
Yeah so I think we, from a macro standpoint, a number of years ago we really began to see kind of the power of data. And that was when the big data buzz word was floating around. A lot of people were talking about it but I think few in our space were really beginning to look at how do we begin to harness that. And so from kind of a big picture standpoint we were asking really 3 questions. One was, how do we get better at forecasting our crops? So how do we get better in knowing how much crop we're going to have and when? The other is how do we gain insight into what, at a farming level was the unknown, right? There's almost this wall you come up against in farming where you kind of get from a lot of this anecdotal data, you just kind of learn through the years the art of farming, right? And getting past that into more of, well we wanted to find was some of the empirical data with farming in getting into that next level granularity and put the science behind it.

Justin Roberson, Lipman Family Farms:
And then the third kind of piece from a data standpoint was, we wanted to digitize the farmers notebook. We noticed early on that we have a network of farms across the US and in each farm has localized management and there's a plethora of knowledge and data that sits in that farm manager's notebook and his notepad and his supervisor's notepad and so we kind of asked the question, how do we begin to centralize that and digitize that so at some point we could begin to pull all that data together and really harness it. And so those were kind of some of the questions we were asking early on and that's when we met Aaron. It was gosh, probably about 6 years ago that we, I think I stumbled upon CropTrack just Google searching, trying to find solutions. And really what stood out to us with CropTrack was the ability to take what we were currently doing and built it, customize it into their platform.

Justin Roberson, Lipman Family Farms:
Most of the other solutions at the time were very off the shelf. We had to fit our operation into their platform and it was very rigid and didn't give us a whole lot of flexibility. So that's kind of how we began the CropTrack journey. And there's been a lot of different pieces to that along the way. But you're asking me about challenges, I think, with any kind of tech project, when you're trying to launch something I think this big is always a challenge. From the investment in resource standpoint, from the time and energy from key personnel and then to primarily the user adoption right? You're taking a lot of employees that maybe had never even hardly worked with a computer, because they're working more hands on on the farm as supervisors, mechanics, very kind of tractor operators and asking them now to carry an iPad and begin capturing a lot of their information and notes into and iPad. And I think the challenge is really in where we really going to make the investment to make this kind of change and have this kind of impact that we're hoping to see.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Yeah through the whole chain because that's a lot of different people. So you were actually looking. You said you did a Google search, so you were actually looking for supply chain management. Was there something that happened that you said, oh okay now we need to find someone to help us with this? What happened that made you think you needed help there?

Justin Roberson, Lipman Family Farms:
Yeah I think there was a lot of internal discussion you know. Lipman has been farming for generations and decades now, so there was never this feal that we were missing something. I think if anything, we've been one of the kind of best in cost from a farm operation standpoint. But a part of that is that we've always pushed ourselves on, how do we get better. And what are we missing? What's kind of the next step? The next iteration in this process and I think a lot of us came to the conclusion that it was, we needed really seriously to begin looking at, specific to our farm operations right. So the crops or supply chain on the farm operations, we needed to begin looking at a much more efficient way to begin digitizing data and then to begin harnessing it and mining it in a way that was going to be give us more of a competitive advantage.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Great. And so did you adopt a whole program at once? Or did you start with pieces and try one piece, and then try another piece and try to tie them together? How did that work? Because you said you didn't have to put your whole system into a system that was already set up and in a way that didn't fit you. So how did you kind of start with the whole system?

Justin Roberson, Lipman Family Farms:
Yeah that's a great question. We started slow because of that. We knew that if we really wanted to make something like this work it really had to be, it had to make sense to the operator, to the farm manager, the supervisors that are going to be using it. And we wanted it to mirror as much as possible what they were doing. And so to do that on the front end took a lot of work from our end to really customize the crop check platform the way that we really needed it to work with our operations. And so in general then yeah we started small. I think we started with one license probably for a number of months and sure Aaron and his team were really wanting to try and sell a lot more but we were slow adopters and we wanted to make sure it was going to work and we approach a lot of our projects that way and try and phase it.

Justin Roberson, Lipman Family Farms:
But build it in a way that if we can prove it out on a small level, that then we could quickly then be able to scale it right? And so I think there was a lot of work put in on the front end that gives us the ability really, once knew this thing was really going to work, begin to scale it across all of our operations, is the way we needed to, that's where Jamie's involvement came into play as an intern and then now it's his professional career. He's helping us really take some of that vision and some of those ideas and help make it then scalable and get all of our operations on board.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
So how long did that take to implement or are you still in the process of implementing?

Justin Roberson, Lipman Family Farms:
We're still implementing. [crosstalk 00:14:15]

Aaron Hutchinson, CropTrak:
And I would say every customer is forever evolving, because they [crosstalk 00:14:19]. Their processes are getting better or they're changing the way they think about things and so it's not uncommon for some to be 4/5 years into it and still kind of evolving the product.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
That makes sense.

Justin Roberson, Lipman Family Farms:
Yeah, you know, the minute we are not implementing is the minute I think we've gotten to comfortable. We've slid down. So we've been using the CropTrack platform now for a number of years and we're still adding to it. We're still building onto it. We're still finding new things that we can incorporate it with. So yeah, absolutely. And I think you said that on the onset, Aaron, just in terms of talking about the company. I mean he is always trying to evolve and iterate and get better and I think in the same token we are doing the same with the product. We're continuously adding features to it for sure.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
So from a management perspective, what are some of the key learnings that would help others in the produce industry and improve the efficiency of their supply chains.

Justin Roberson, Lipman Family Farms:
You know change takes time. And I think there's a lot of expectations that, when we launched this we would have it fully implemented. That we would have all the users on board. But that was a process. There was a lot of stakeholders in a process like this and a lot of people involved and so something that we learned quickly was that this wasn't obviously going to be a success unless the user base was involved. And so really being able to build kind of the reputation with the user base and focusing on that I think really helped make this a success. I think just in general, change is always a challenge and it can be a challenge no matter what kind of solution we implement. But I think those things we kind of learned, and I think we still see it and there so much opportunity within our supply chain and within other supply chains to continue just to leverage some technology like this and even other solutions that will give us a lot more visibility into our supply chain. The ability to streamline and implement more efficient and optimized processes.

Aaron Hutchinson, CropTrak:
I think he said something really important there. He said he got his customer. His customer involved in the sense, his user, his field user. So many times big organizations adopt IT projects like this and IT rolls it out. And the person in the end gets whatever they deliver and one of the things that limited really well was almost at the beginning there was a user sitting there at the table, having a vote, on what was good and what was bad. Maybe it was bad for IT but it was good for them, and we had to figure out how to bend the data to make it useful on both ends. So I think that's a really important message.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
So Aaron, just-

Justin Roberson, Lipman Family Farms:
Absolutely. And I think, yeah go ahead.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
No I was just going to ask Aaron to follow up on that. So how much specialization do you have to do with customers in the ... do you have to change the product that you're delivering to them or can you just help them solve some problems on the current products that you have?

Aaron Hutchinson, CropTrak:
So we're a no-code environment and the way we assemble it is really how we bend it to meet their processes and everything. So hopefully, these guys would say yeah, Shani and the team where a part of their team because we had process engineers who were professionally trained to get into the process with these guys and help them out. But we're there in the trenches with them almost all the time to ... helping them push the envelope for the tools and then whenever we've got to bend the tool and the engineering to make it do something they want to do, we go do that too right. We we're involved in all our customers lives. We don't just get in to drop it and run. Which is good and bad right? So we learn a lot about food and a lot about our customers.

Justin Roberson, Lipman Family Farms:
CropTrack has been a great strategic partner through this rollout. From monthly to weekly calls, and status and as far as the implementation goes they have been our biggest partner aside from our user base for sure. And Jamie alluded to this in her introduction but it circles back to what Aaron was saying, having somebody like him, he was our go between, between operations and IT kind of helping to mend that relationship is critical and in key. So somebody that can speak the operation language, can understand it, can know exactly what the operators need, but then come back and also be able to speak some of the IT language and be able to help pull together some vision for the IT side of things as well. Like Aaron said, the CropTrack no code environment gave us the ability to kind of build out a lot of what we wanted to with little to no IT expertise. But then internally we've also layered on all kinds of, some of our IT systems and infrastructure to speak with and work with a lot of the CropTrack data. And so having somebody in a role like Jamie's really helps make that a success.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
So Jamie, takes us onto the farm. Can you describe some of the improvements you've made and how growers are responding?

Jamie Marin, Lipman Family Farms:
Yeah definitely. Like Justin alluded to earlier, we set out with this immediate goal of digitizing that farmer's notebook which gave us a great template or a great platform for what we wanted to achieve. So right there it gave us everything that they think is important, and everything that they're referencing in order to make the decisions that they're doing. So from there we got a great foundation for a data collection system that previously was very inefficient and scattered across pretty much all parts of the US. We had issues with, we almost came up with a CropTrack dictionary that, at this location they call it this, and at this location they call it this. So being able to effectively put that together was a huge improvement operationally to begin with. So that was one of the very first improvements that we set out to do was, we need to make this universal, for us.

Jamie Marin, Lipman Family Farms:
And from there we just copied that farmer's notebook. We built some reports on top of it and now there's a source for data across lots of other departments and divisions. But then we took a really strong and early look at our scouting and our crop monitoring, so that's been digitized on CropTrack now for about 6 years. And with the ability to import or back load some of the information we have weekly crop monitoring information going back about 10 years. Which is invaluable to us and is available to us in any format that we think is useful at that time.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
So how is technology helping you to assess the information and increase transparency across your supply chain?

Jamie Marin, Lipman Family Farms:
Yeah so I think data collection systems like CropTrack allow us to be really intentional about what we capture. One of the biggest advantages that we found using CropTrack is the flexibility to measure what we want, and how we want it and still be the owners and regulators of our own data. That ability to customize has really allowed us to place CropTrack right at the pillar of our data strategy and it's one of the first things that we look to when there's a novel problem to solve in terms of data collections. It's like, can we put CropTrack to do that?

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
So what did you have to do to engage your customers or your partners in the system? Was there any hesitation or worry, what were the issues that you had to solve and can you give an example of someone you worked with that was maybe in particularly challenging?

Jamie Marin, Lipman Family Farms:
Yeah. So I think, from the onset we recognized that we needed, that we had this opportunity to leverage out data. That was the goal that we saw from a data strategy standpoint, well not yet, because I was still an intern, but I came to learn that a little bit later. But we had to first and foremost make the farmers and their supervisory, their foremen, we had to make their lives easier. And we need to make it a farm censored initiative. Like Justin talked about earlier, it really was that a lot of the time I would be weeks and weeks away from the office because I was at the farms working on a problem, integrating, iterating and truly answering to them in order to create that bond between the user and the product so that it mended well and it was used properly. But yeah, I think innovation in general was really iterative. We tried capturing some data in some ways, and that didn't quite work, and it wasn't ... but I think they'll be the most honest when it doesn't' work. And maybe not so honest when it's working just fine.

Jamie Marin, Lipman Family Farms:
But when something's not user friendly it's quickly rejected. We can see the usage on some of the forms and we can see that they're not filling them out. But every year we have our farmers retreat where we group up all the farmers from around the country. And this year we did a presentation on how we're supplementing some of their existing reporting with machine learning models that we built using the data that they're collecting in CropTrack. And one of our owners came up to me after the presentation and he said something to the effect of, "If you would have told me that when we started this initiative you would have had an IT guy talking analytics, machine learning and AI and having those farmers right there and engaged in asking questions, and not throw me out of the room when I told them I can predict their yields better than they could, I would have called you crazy."

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
That's great.

Jamie Marin, Lipman Family Farms:
I think it's shows that making the tool about them as opposed to this sort of some corporative thing that they need to abide by, it created great rapport and communication channels between IT and farming. And I think they trust that they're not just the users, but they're key stakeholders and they can steer that ship in whatever way they want.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
That's great. That's a great answer. So Aaron, you work with many growers in produce. Some in the beginning stages of their tech journey, others like Lipman that are way out ahead. What can others learn from your past technology implementation?

Aaron Hutchinson, CropTrak:
That is a great question. As you heard Lipman say, I'll kind of rephrase it, if you track it you can approve it, right. But based on who you are, and they also said this, the it. The thing that will likely make a difference in the organization, is it one size fits all? And we told you even within his organization and all of his farms had a little one size fits each organization, sub organization. So that's one of the reasons why we have a tag line on our website that says, track what matters, because in the end that's all that matters is that you get the kind of information you to ML or get to decision making that you're talking about. And one of the, and I explained a good reason why we have a flexible platform. I was going to say, when he was talking about rolling it out and all that, a company really shouldn't abandon what's really working for them because they want to do digital capture of important data. And instead what we need to do is put in place some sort of processes that allow them to capture the essential information and capture the business rules that go along with it.

Aaron Hutchinson, CropTrak:
Because it actually takes both of those if you want data confidence and data repeatability. Because if you don't have either of those you're just guessing all the time anyway. And you're not going to get to the kind of end goal that you're looking for. Kind of an example, I think COVID was a great validator of how important having data and embedded business rules in your digital platform can be for an organization. I think COVID required everybody to break their routines, distribute their employees, and find new ways to kind of get business done. And for all our customers, they knew that they didn't need every one of those contracted acres they had out there. But they still had to fulfill some their contract obligations. And so what was interesting was, they took the tools to determine the most profitable areas to harvest By considering their grower contracts, their hauling contracts as executed against them, where their processing facilities were and such and then they were able to tweak those business rules inside the tool and execute those changes. To only pick those individual fields and bring them in and meet those contracts.

Aaron Hutchinson, CropTrak:
We needed very little impact on their employees, their growers and ... because we were doing it at business rule level inside the tool, we also still were able to 100% audit all of the loads that came across the scale when we're working towards a settlement. And if you had had to try to do that on the fly with paper and that would have been just almost an impossible, untenable thing that you want to take on. And so I got really excited to seeing this software doing this agile task, because that's the way I think about it. Somebody in the room said, "If we could just figure out which ones are the cheapest ones, we should only harvest those." Then it led to all of these no code changes that allowed this to happen and what was kind of cool was to hear the customer's excitement. Where the time that took him to do it, which was really, really fast, and the money he saved making his decisions. And I'm sure Lipman has some examples somewhere that is relevant inside of their infrastructure.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
That's a great story yeah.

Jamie Marin, Lipman Family Farms:
I think Aaron just to add onto that, we definitely do. I think we have created additional clear channels of information and communication flowing from the farm through payroll, packing, sales, accounting, they all rely on the data that's being stored in CropTrack to do functional business. That is a core part of what we do in that process. The CropTrack data comes first and we believe and understand it to be correct through the processes that we've set up. And there's always checks and balances in our system and in our enterprise but CropTrack being able to do some of those things has been a huge help for us.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
SO kind of going out in scope a little bit for the group, what do you think are the biggest challenges you anticipate for the produce industry going forward and how will technology solve them? Aaron why don't you start?

Aaron Hutchinson, CropTrak:
Well well I would say labor is probably one of the biggest ones for everybody. Particularly in the produce world. And I think we're seeing all kinds of things happen around this, between robotics and vertical farming and I think there's no lack of creativity trying to be applied to this business to solve that business problem there. I think that's probably going be the biggest form because it's labor cost a lot and the number of people that takes to do these things and the number of people that are around we got to feed. These are compounding problems that we have to kind of deal with.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Yeah. Justin or Jamie do you have anything to add to that?

Justin Roberson, Lipman Family Farms:
Yeah I always come back to it's something like 40% of the product that's grown in the field never makes it to the fork. And that's really one of the challenges of the food waste problem. And so I agree with Aaron, absolutely labor is probably one of the biggest challenges for ag. But right there with it is the idea of, how do we get better. And so this idea of some of the food waste I think we see as an opportunity. And really it just means that there is so much more we can get better at across the supply chain. And the only way, or the primary way we're going to get there I believe really is with coming up with innovative tech solutions.

Justin Roberson, Lipman Family Farms:
And whether it's robotics, whether it's a lot of AI that's coming out that's going to help optimize supply and demand. There's all kind of things I think from technology on the forefront of it really is going to have an impact on the produce supply industry as a whole. And so we're excited to see that and I really think you're going to see a lot more sufficiencies gained in the whole fresh product supply chain.

Justin Roberson, Lipman Family Farms:
And we're starting to see some of it on our end. We just think there's so much more to go and so that gets us excited. We're opportunistic and I think it's reflective of the rest of the industry.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). So how has technology helped Lipman maintain its resiliency, be that to COVID, climate change or other economic pressures?

Jamie Marin, Lipman Family Farms:
Yeah so I think just as the cost of input and the landscape just becomes more and more complexed, having the visibility to our operations through that operational data that we're storing and capturing in tools like CropTrack, it will help us fill in the pieces of the puzzle that we fill in the market place or the labor force, and identify which ones we can control and the ultimate goal is to keep our operations costs low.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Mm-hmm (affirmative)- With increasing expectations for transparency across the supply chain, on the grocery shelves or label, or from an ESG perspective, where do you think the produce industry will be in 5 years? Get your crystal ball out.

Justin Roberson, Lipman Family Farms:
I'll would probably add to your list there, transparency of carbon. If we think about how we started with transparency with food and how it's grown to be just the food itself but the input into the food and all of that, I think we are going to look at carbon in the same way. I think carbon's a crop. And like a crop we're going to have to track it and do all of those bits and pieces. So in 5 years I think you're going to look back a 503 company is going to say, "Was that a good carbon? Was it collected by a dirty battery or was it collected by agronomic practice that left the world better than we found it kind of thing."

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
So Aaron are you guys thinking about how to track that then, and how to have that be part of what you offer?

Aaron Hutchinson, CropTrak:
We already do. And we do it for some really large companies on a global market.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
I didn't know that!

Aaron Hutchinson, CropTrak:
So we're tracking, encapsulating, working with universities both in the US and Europe for ESG calculators and as well as sustainability and compliance. Because the other side of this is there's a whole level of compliance that's coming with the EU's version of the Green Deal some other kinds of things that are going on around the planet. So you can't just sell your food anymore. You need to sell with all the paper. And so all of that paper needs to be there at the same time as the arrival. And so for our customers we help them make sure that every piece of that paper is there as well as filled out properly, so their product is received and accepted.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Kind of leads to my next questions which is, earlier this month the UN issued a report calling on agriculture specifically to reduce the impact of climate change. What immediate and long term changes do you foresee?

Justin Roberson, Lipman Family Farms:
I think Aaron hit on that quite a bit. There's going to be more and more regulation requirement to begin to track a lot of this. I think some of the food waste issues that we talked about across the global supply chain is going to continue to be a focus. And then the transparency thing, I think it all has been there from the onset of the food safety requirement and it just continues to evolve and expand. And so the company we've called it excess to the acre, and really only give our customer that access to the acre and so in a lot of ways I think that there's of this that's going to become the new norm and is already with onset of blockchain and other technologies that are giving companies the ability to track some of their supply chain through this. But I think that the flip side is, it's going to reward those that are doing the things. And for those that are great operators, I think they're going to continue to be able to perform and do well. And I think the challenge is going to be maybe for those that have operated somewhat in the dark or under the radar.

Justin Roberson, Lipman Family Farms:
It's going to force them to change some of their policies and procedures with the things that they're doing into they perform to stand again and play, I think it's going to reward, like I said, a lot of the good actors will be rewarded to do this and there's going to be a lot of value to that. Some of that transparency and accountability will come with it.

Aaron Hutchinson, CropTrak:
I think you hit on something right. I mean the most progressive produce guys were already using sustainability resource saving processes, drip tape and everything else because it meant that they had less costs in their crop which helped them with their profitability and all of that. So this is not a new concept I think for a lot of the produce guys. I think it's a new concept for cows and people with large range areas. At the end of the day we're only talking about 2% of farmland usage in North America or in the Americas is really produce. So our impact as a community is a little bit small from that perspective because we don't a lot of acres to work with. But because water is so expensive in the places where we ... in Arizona and California where we grow these things, we've always been resource retrained and it has benefited those who've taken our sustainable kind of processes right out of the gate.

Aaron Hutchinson, CropTrak:
Like you said, I think if those who've been able to get away without being able to do that, because they live somewhere with unlimited water or the like, this is going to be a lot harder for them. I think it's going to be a documentation really issue. The UN's processes, when I look at them on a more global level for some of our customers, we're worried about the Jaborandi rain forest to plant that crop. Are you employing the indigenous population and not paying them, so slave labor, are you employing children under age, are you not paying a reasonable salary, are you not providing education and things like that.

Aaron Hutchinson, CropTrak:
So the paper part of agriculture is getting thicker and thicker. And the community wants to know that story on the receiving end of it. That they didn't do harm in the process of feeding themselves. When I think about all these things is, I can't be healthy if the thing I put in my mouth isn't healthy, and the place it was grown wasn't healthy, and the earth that it was grown in wasn't healthy. So there is a tie, this stuff does all tie back together in the end.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Mm-hmm (affirmative)- So my last question. Not meant to be a trick questions, but I was just curious. What's the favorite product to you all that Lipman grows or produces. And you can use either a crop or a brand. So Jamie let's start with you.

Jamie Marin, Lipman Family Farms:
I actually, I really like the Romas. We're getting them more and more close by at our grocery stores here in Florida. So I'm saying I think always the top favorite. I really like to cook and it's the core of a lot of my recipes, is tomatoes or tomato sauce.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
Fabulous.

Justin Roberson, Lipman Family Farms:
I'll go with our flagship brand, the Crimson Queen. That's really a B&B food service standpoint so a lot of the people are probably eating the Crimson Queen without necessarily realizing it. But tremendous flavor, color, just probably one of the best fewer growing tomatoes that's on the market.

Vonnie Estes, PMA:
I hope you enjoyed this real life look supply chain management. Thanks for listening. That's it for this episode PMA Takes on Tech. Thanks for allowing us to serve as your guide to the new world of produce and technology. Be sure to check out all our episodes at pma.com and wherever you get your podcast. Please subscribe and I would love to get any comments or suggestions of what you might want me to take on. For now, stay safe, eat your fruits and vegetables, and we will see you next time.