Automation Ladies
The podcast where girls talk industrial automation!
We interview people from all walks of life in the Industrial Automation industry. Through a personal narrative/conversational framework we talk about PLCs, SCADA, IIoT, Machine Vision, Industrial Robots, Pneumatics, Control Systems, Process Automation, Factory Automation, Systems Integration, Entrepreneurship, Career Stories, Personal Journeys, Company Culture, and any other interesting and timely topic we want to discuss.
Co-Hosted by Nikki Gonzales and Ali G - find them on LinkedIn.
Automation Ladies
Modernizing Dairy Farming with Automation ft. Vinny Endres
Nikki & Ali, sit down with Vinny Endres, owner of Bitmasked Automation & a trailblazer in dairy farm automation. Vinny shares his journey from growing up on a dairy farm to becoming a diesel mechanic, then discovering his passion for electrical engineering & automation.
He shares his unique perspective integrating robotic technologies in dairy farming, the potential of teleoperation, the promise of autonomous milling systems, & reconfiguring traditional farming processes to be more automation-friendly.
Huge thank you to Inductive Automation for sponsoring this episode!
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Co-Hosts are Alicia Gilpin Director of Engineering at Process and Controls Engineering LLC, Nikki Gonzales Head of Partnerships at Quotebeam, and Courtney Fernandez Robot Master at FAST One Solutions.
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Get in touch with us at automationladies.io!
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Audio Editing by Laura Marsilio | Music by ...
Welcome to another episode of Automation Ladies. This one is pre-recorded in my office here in Houston with Allie on site. Hey, allie, hi. So we've been hanging out for the last few days here. We've done a couple of recordings this week and so we're not entirely sure when this is going to air possibly sometime after our stint at the assembly show next week and automate, but we have, yeah, busy conference season coming up, so we wanted to try to get a few episodes recorded here with people that we've been waiting to talk to for a long time, one of them being our guest today, vinny Andrus, who we most recently saw in person in Dallas at TraceRouteCon, the infamous training class for networking industrial networking run by our friend Josh Varghese at Traceroute, and that is part of what inspired our upcoming conference. That part of why Ali is in Houston is that we were just touring the Phoenix Contact Customer Experience.
Speaker 2:Center, technology Center.
Speaker 1:Yeah, customer technology center. I'll get the terminology correct to make sure that we you know to finalize hosting our event there. So our event is called OT Skate-a-Con. You probably have heard about it by now If you haven't go check it out automationladiesio slash OTSkate-a-Con, and Vinny is going to be one of our speakers there as well. So we are super excited to get you to you know, get to know him a little bit and hear his backstory, and one of the things that we bonded over eating barbecue, uh, in dallas, was the fact that he works with a lot of dairies and dairy farms and has a background in that and and Allie and I actually more of a family history than direct experience, but my grandfather worked at a dairy plant his whole career making butter. Allie's grandfather also made butter, so we have a dairy lineage, so to speak, and so we got super excited to talk about dairy and all kinds of farm and farm automation with Vinny. So, vinny, thank you so much for coming on to our show.
Speaker 3:Absolutely Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:You're welcome. You're one of the well, not one of the few people. It's getting more common these days when we say, hey, come on the show, and you were like, yeah, sure, okay, Made it easy. Can you tell us for our audience? Just give us a little. I guess our first question is generally can you tell us the backstory of how the heck you got into automation?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I grew up on a dairy farm, as you mentioned, and actually kind of had a little stint where I wanted to be an engineer. In middle school that took all the advanced math and then hit high school and lost that motivation and decided to be a diesel mechanic and ended up going to school for crop and soil science actually so big twist of events there and then came back to the farm to work as a diesel mechanic, did not use crop and soil science at all and as a mechanic actually disliked electronics entirely. I would avoid them and if it needed it I would just send it in. But eventually I read this book. I wish I could remember the name and if it needed it I would just send it in. But eventually I read this book. I wish I could remember the name. I think it was ESI something, but it was a guy who wrote this book on graph paper explaining electricity. It was the first one that was dumbed down enough I actually understood it. And then I learned how a relay works and thought I was smart.
Speaker 3:So fast forward a few more years. We're putting in a new parlor at the farm and an electrician walks by this alarm interface box and it's full of relays, he goes why didn't they just put a PLC in here? What's a PLC? So I look it up and this thing looks pretty neat. Tried my hand at some other programming in the past. I always liked thinking with computer games but never really stuck it out, and so this is a nice low barrier to entry. I could get dinking with computer games but never really stuck it out, and so this is a nice low barrier to entry. I could get along with this. It's visual and got a PLC, taught myself how to do it, replaced a few things around the farm.
Speaker 3:Had a close friend in the ag community from the East Coast contact me about making his ice machine for his vegetables run from his phone and thought, wow, people will pay you to do this. So got very kind of really interested in that and decided that I wanted to explore that a little more and see where things went. So decided electrical engineering is probably a good path to go back to school for and it's a terrible choice when you're older it's very hard to do, but especially electrical engineering. But did it anyways and it was very interesting. Did a nice flexible transfer program they had and had worked for an integrator for a little bit, had to leave that to finish the schooling and had big plans to stay work for a few more years with other people, hopefully with this goal of coming back and doing my own thing.
Speaker 3:At some point. The problem kind of came up that just had so many people asking for things in the ag community. Primarily that it was you kind of had to make a choice and so while I left without the best knowledge of you know what you would consider an experienced person in the integration world, I did understand the process we were trying to automate. So I kind of went there and it's most of this world is what's your Rolodex for an outdated term, I guess networking and just networking.
Speaker 1:I just said that on your last podcast I used that term too.
Speaker 3:The Rolodex.
Speaker 1:I don't mean the actual physical Rolodex, I mean your network. She has one and I do have an actual physical one.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I have a stack of business cards. It really is. And my parents, my whole family, has kind of been big on networking. From when we were younger. My parents kind of instilled that in us, drug us to all the different organizations through dairy farming. We had Jersey cows, so we were really active in that and saw the power of having a nationwide network of people with similar ideas and similar industries. And so I kind of developed my own in the ag world through the years, talking smart on the internet, things like that, and really that all kind of came back. You know that you had all these people knew who you were, saw what you were doing and just started asking if you could do stuff. So that it really grew from there. And and uh, started bitmas, uh three years ago now, um, actually like three years and four days ago officially and and it's uh really kind of just taken off primarily through the word of mouth um, in the fresh produce and dairy and then grain as well.
Speaker 1:Okay, so that's Bitmasked Automation.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, correct. So I didn't like Endress Automation because spelling my last name is very hard. You have to do it phonetically over the phone. So I wanted to be cute and use something from computers that none of your customers would understand. So I used BitMask and then, the first time I spelt it over the phone, realized my mistake.
Speaker 1:Allie and I were actually just talking about it earlier. She was encouraged not to put her own name on her company even though we so a friend of ours that David Turner. He just changed his company name to Turner process.
Speaker 3:Turner process automation.
Speaker 1:Turner process automation maybe.
Speaker 3:I think so.
Speaker 1:I think process systems.
Speaker 3:That may be correct.
Speaker 1:But it has the word Turner in it, and now I'll remember that because his old company name, which was a much more descriptive, it was just hard for me to keep track of it it was process and automation specialists, I think.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 1:I was like I know it's process and specialists, but yeah, there's pros and cons to I guess those. I grew up with the last name, haskrimstotir, and so putting my name on anything would probably be just like instant suicide. Yeah, I feel your pain there. I love the company name, by the way.
Speaker 2:Why did you? I mean, what does it mean to you outside of? Like it was cute, like do you have like some kind of I don't know what it means to you?
Speaker 3:No, no, there's nothing cool. I need to come up with a fake one someday, though, for, uh, if I ever have to give a fancy presentation, uh, but.
Speaker 2:I bet you could come up with some yeah probably it, it really was.
Speaker 3:I was sitting in in in school still at the time when I started it, and just looking at all the things around us and I was like, well, I don't know, I mean it's something a little generic. It came up. One was like two end solutions, you know cause binary is two to the end. Maybe that would have been a better idea. But then, yeah, the bit mask came up, and then there's a little debate about proper English and if it should be bit mask or bit masked, which just plain bit mask would have been way easier to spell. But it is what it is.
Speaker 1:Well, now we've discussed it enough that really anybody that wants to remember it probably can.
Speaker 3:Yeah, don't forget the E-D.
Speaker 1:And I'm assuming your website would be what Bitmaskautomationcom.
Speaker 3:It's actually just Bitmaskcom. Keep it even simpler.
Speaker 1:Oh okay, Nobody had that yeah yeah, that that's that also nowadays can play a big factor in what company name you choose yes you got to go see if the domain is available and then you're like, oh, am I going to go fornet or io, or do I have to change the name or buy out whoever ownscom? Somebody actually reached out to us recently offering to sell us the domain automationladiescom.
Speaker 3:Nice.
Speaker 1:For like several hundred or maybe several thousand dollars, I don't remember, but we're good. We were like nah, we're fine. So you and then also, like I guess your company name does not constrain you to farm or produce or any of the particular applications that you work on no, it doesn't, and that was part of the goal.
Speaker 3:At first. I had no idea where any of this was going to go. I actually didn't even it's actually it didn't even get registered as bitmast automation.
Speaker 3:I added that in later so people would know that that's what we're doing, because at the time is doing a bunch of 3d printers, doing a bunch of a whole bunch of things, and and it wasn't really until um you know, uh, the last year, especially where really just honed in on the egg stuff you know, went through some read, some books, went through some leadership things and a lot of them these days talk about find what you're kind of good at and just stick to that. You know, every time you branch out, you're spending a lot of time and resources trying to learn something new, which is fine to an extent, but that has a cost to it. So if you can find an area that you're good at, stick to it, and there's plenty of people in the industrial space that are doing a great job, space that are doing a great job.
Speaker 1:If someone asked me to do something, I would consider it but we're not actively looking to get into those markets if they're not closely related to HAG. Yeah Well, that's a great position to be in, to have the network and to be well-known for what you can do and for people to have that trust that they want to call somebody that they know or that they know of, versus you know, versus trying to maybe find somebody that has the top of the line, best experience, most fancy everything, but you know they, they're unknown to you.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 1:And I think we'll do they discount how much that emotional factor plays into business decisions. Sometimes, just knowing that you can call somebody and that they're not going to BS you over the phone or whatever like that's that's a huge value in business versus just yeah, you may or may not like be the most experienced company that's been around for the longest doing this, um, uh, at least for me and I see that with my dad too uh, most of his projects have come from people that know him. My job came from somebody that knows me. If I had sent out my resume to quote beam to become employee number one and they didn't know me, they'd be like I don't think it would have even made it to anybody's desk.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 1:One thing that you said, though, about your parents, and that's really cool. I you know, and I'm going to take this lesson and try to teach my kids that you know networking early, when you just to get to know and make sure that you are plugged into those communities later on, when you have something to offer. You know those people, know you Right, and I don't think that you can ever start too early with those sorts of things. If there's a way, right, I'm not going to like start shoving my kids to trade shows and like make them hand out business cards.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, and a lot of mine was, you know, the stuff with my parents was a little going to conventions and all that and the events more in-person networking, Most of my acquaintances.
Speaker 3:To this day I still don't even haven't met half of them in person and even this first customer of mine he had never met me.
Speaker 3:I didn't even know his real name, because this goes back to forums where you didn't use your real name back in the day and most of that networking with all those people really was I kind of. I've always I like to learn, which most of us engineers types like to, and so people would post a question and I would not know the answer, but I'd be like, well, we could figure out what a likely answer would be to it and actually do a lot of research and try to figure out that answer, because now you have that knowledge, because if someone doesn't ask the question and if you get a thousand people on the internet asking questions, that's a lot more pool of knowledge to draw from and so things that interested me and answer them and I guess that just kind of created a lot of connections with a lot of people that eventually evolved, you know, through emails or Facebook or whatever it was started to learn the real faces behind some of them and connect with a nice small group of them.
Speaker 1:So what forums specifically have you been frequenting or use?
Speaker 3:Well, so back in the day, a lot of the ag ones came from one called New Ag Talk. Actually it was one of the original ag forums from the 90s. It wasn't called that initially, but I got on it kind of late. My forums experiences started when I was younger, as a mechanic working on the farm. I worked on people's Duramaax diesel pickups on the side and so I was in all of those different forms. That was kind of my first exposure, and so when these companies keep updating their forums the past five, ten years and they move away from the v bulletin format, I'm still kind of stuck in my ways. Uh, but that that was where the experience. What's that?
Speaker 1:yeah, it doesn't be. Forums are their own experience and I don't. In my opinion, they don't need to be messed with, like just if it's an active forum and people are on there and they are still exchanging ideas and whatever, like leave it alone. I don't. I don't know, maybe just me.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think the last one I remember being you know, because naturally we all look at PLCsnet and that was the last one in kind of the true VBulletin format and I know it changed. I don't know if it's still a part of VBulletin, but I know it just updated the last couple of months. So that was the last shred of youth, I guess, gone. But these days I don't spend much time on a lot of the, the ag related ones as much. I stay more in using the, the same philosophy kind of on some of the forums that are specific for the hardware use, or you know, the two generic. There are the three generic places we all go to for PLC stuff PLC'snet, reddit and LinkedIn, and just try to stay up on everything as much as I can.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that's a great tip to any of our listeners. If you are interested in branching out into areas that you don't have much of a network or you need more knowledge, those are some great forums to hit up. I don't know about Mr PLC. Did you ever frequent that hit up? Uh, I don't know about mr plc. Did you ever frequent that forum?
Speaker 3:I myself didn't know that one, and there was like a control forum that night or something too. I've never I've come across a lot of them, but I I'm a late bloomer really in the plc world. I've only been in it for uh well, realistically like five years.
Speaker 1:So yeah, okay, well, now you have some tips as to where the discussions are happening, at least for people that have kind of come into it in the last five years. And yeah, go answer questions, go add some value and, like vinny said, you don't often you don't necessarily have to know the answer to the question to be able to, you know, be part of the discussion. Maybe add a. Maybe this would help or maybe there's something here. I found that to work a lot for me just trying to be helpful even if I don't know an answer. If nobody's given the great answer, just try to point to some resources or bring other people into the conversation. It's a great way to kind of organically network and get people to pay attention or they see you around more often.
Speaker 1:We were just at last week at this association for high tech distribution and I was talking to another startup founder yesterday who was going to his first event with their new company it's a tech crunch conference and I was like, yeah, at least in my experience, people want to see you around three to four times before they start paying attention to your pitch.
Speaker 1:So don't just try to go. I mean, everybody has if you're having something, if you have to sell something. It's hard because you kind of have to go try to sell yourself, but if at all, if you can just participate before you have anything to sell, that can be a huge win just to get people to be familiar with you. Um, and I see, in our industry anyway, it seems to be a big thing to have some references or be known in the industry or the community or something, versus just like especially people coming in from outside the industry that have all the answers but I don't. I see generally that they don't, you know, they don't get the reception that they're looking for when they come in like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's one of it's interesting. You mentioned the number of touches you need to, you know, get someone to be comfortable with you. I was reading a book right now about prospecting that's mentions that specific thing and they do say plan 10 to 20 different touches for someone that's completely cold to you, you know that you have no previous relationship with, and that can be as simple as they see you and make a social media post. I mean that counts, but it's more that awareness of it and where we see a lot of that drop down to very low numbers or almost instant sales, is really the networking side of it. I mean, ag is small, like any other industry, and so it seems like most of our customers not more than one or two connections removed from them, we always know someone that's the same person. It's kind of an automatic referral that way, if you weren't directly referred in the first place and then, like you said, a newcomer just coming in, it can be tough without the background.
Speaker 3:Now, granted, I mean at least I grew up in it, so I kind of have that crutch to fall back on. That doesn't mean you have to grow up in an industry to be good at it. I didn't grow up with PLCs. It's debatable if I'm good at them, but having that experience really, especially in ours industry, is useful because these everyone that we're working with is new to PLC. So, versus going into established manufacturing where they say you have to use this brand PLC, here's our programming style guide.
Speaker 3:You're more you know. In a way you're almost a subcontractor to that company themselves, doing the work exactly the way they want it and they know exactly what they want, which is can have its advantages as well. It's a lot easier to plan for a budget where the stuff we're doing they may not even have heard of a PLC. So we're using hardware that makes our development times fast and then most of the time is spent on understanding their process and pointing out areas where things can be done. You know, had a recent conversation with someone who wanted to delay the startup of a motor so that things could warm up and I said, well, yeah, if we tie that in, we can automate that delay. He said, yeah, but if it's already been running it doesn't need the delay. And you know it's the thinking and timers and relays that is a challenge to add, but in this environment we can add this. So it's really you can't push everything on everyone at once.
Speaker 1:It's really get in, get something working for for them, let the wheels start turning, then come back and update a lot of the software yeah, and I think a lot of people you know they're they need some small wins to get comfortable yeah um, and I think too, if you get, if you go too big on the scope to begin with, there's more potential issues, especially if the customer is is inexperienced, then they may not know what to ask, or, you know, there there can be gaps in communication, um, and there's a lot, you know, more potential for failure on a big project, and then a lot of people get turned off from automation altogether they will you really only have one shot, or what was that, ellie?
Speaker 3:if they get burned at all, they're just like I'm good exactly, yeah, you, you really only have one shot, especially, uh, you know, ag, it's usually the guy signing the check, or girl signing the check is the one that is operating this stuff. So there, if it doesn't work half the time, they won't even tell you, they just won't call you again. And and they'll you know, naturally, if someone else asks them about it, they're going to tell them their experience with it. So it's kind of staying in contact with them of you know, cause mistakes get made, things get misinterpreted. It's like, how can we improve this to make it work? Uh, fortunately we haven't really had too many issues with that. We try to stay pretty close contact, uh, with all the customers and we keep we usually have remote access to always keep anything working. But, yeah, it's it really get in. Just get them comfortable with a little lately.
Speaker 3:You know, I guess a good example of finding a way in the door has been level monitoring for us, for whatever reason everybody likes. Nobody likes to climb a grain bin to know what's in it, for starters, and manure is very hard to measure because it's uh, traditional sensors don't work. Radar is really the only thing that works. So when you can come in and kind of solve a problem that's really been annoying them. That's a great way to open the door and a simple way for them to be comfortable because it is reliable. Um, and then from there you you can kind of progress, but you do still need a place to test all your new ideas. And so finding that customer that is the tinkerer and does understand it and is willing to test you, know your new ideas and knows how to get it running at midnight when you're not there, that's a useful avenue to find as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, do you have many of those?
Speaker 3:Most of them are relatives and they get the unknown family discount of. They get to try my new ideas.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's a good one. Yeah, you know, you mentioned kind of before that you know the small world aspect and yeah, we were just at a party. I threw a networking party yesterday and I bought a book I don't have it with me, but I saw it from a post from a connection on LinkedIn who had a picture with them and the guy that wrote the book. And then I looked at that guy's profile and I was like, oh, he wrote this book that looks interesting and I ordered it. And then, right after chapter one, it had a challenge to you know, just do it like book your own party and get it started. And I did and I invited my dad.
Speaker 1:It says like you should mix up different groups of people, right? So the point is to kind of like run this structured two-hour networking party with different groups of people that you know, um, and friends, family, uh, neighbors and then like professional connections, um and I my dad is both a professional connection and my neighbor and my family, I guess, um, but he's, you know, we're from iceland, he does not network much, he doesn't get out much, and he happened to make a connection at this party yesterday. So he's from iceland, we're from iceland, um, and my dad has one business that runs temperature monitoring for grocery stores, uh, coolers, fridges, freezers, pharmacies and a few other types of things. But, and this, this woman that showed up to the party yesterday has taken over running her father's business and they, um, do what was it? Allie the?
Speaker 2:air curtains.
Speaker 1:They're like air curtains for refrigeration systems, like big walk-ins, like walk-ins in the grocery stores where you walk into, like the Costco, like refrigerated rooms and she has a big presence in Iceland of all places Like they, because most of our grocery stores there use those instead of having, like the you know, two aisles of like frozen foods, uh, freezers, and, like I, what are the odds of that? But that that was their first time meeting. They didn't need the 12, you know touches because they had such a freaking niche thing that they connected on, so that was really easy to make that connection. Um, and when you run into somebody that has a solution to a very niche problem that you and only a few people care about, that's one of those, I think, examples that you can skip the 12 touches, because just that involvement in that tiny little niche is enough to create some trust or or enough interest to do some business together.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:That actually connected to a point we made earlier. My next question that I thought of where you were talking was like what are some of your most favorite or coolest applications that you've gotten to work on on the farm or elsewhere?
Speaker 3:Well, as I said, my first paid project was an ice machine and I still have a soft spot for those. They're, you know, these days, are. It's a relatively simple thing. We've done them quite a few times, but there's still nothing more satisfying than, you know, turning starting that thing up and then seeing ice drop out of it. Um, and for some context, I guess, because for audio, uh, these are not.
Speaker 3:Some of my friends ask me too you're working on hotel ice machines and stuff. No, these you know commercialized plants, for produce primarily. So they usually do about 100 to 300,000 pounds of ice a day and you know 150 to 300 horsepower to run these, just the ammonia side of them, and so there's a lot going on on them to make them work. You know the ammonia refrigeration system, the ice builder itself and the storage and all the infeed sides of everything and they need to run lights out. But those are seeing the ice drop because it is a cyclic process. At Tube Ice, every 10 minutes they drop ice and it's pretty satisfying to watch. But the you know some of the more unique ones. We've been doing some stuff with ag robotics. We don't do the robots, but the integrating of all the systems around it. That's fun to be a part of because that is the way ag is moving. Fun to be a part of because that is the way ag is moving.
Speaker 1:So what are some of the coolest innovations in that space that you've seen actually work out in the field? What types of robots have you been integrating?
Speaker 3:Melking robots are not a new thing by any means. They've been around for 30 years Commercially, actually almost 30. But those have really the last few years, have really last decade especially have really gotten to a point where there's there's no longer a debate of can they do it and how good can they do it. It's just you know the finances of how do we make this facility work type of thing, finances of how do we make this facility work type of thing. But because it's it's pretty much shown they can do a more consistent job than any, even some of the best farmers.
Speaker 3:Even if you're the, if you're the best farmer and you're the best at milking your cow, that's great.
Speaker 3:But if all your time, if you're spending hours milking cows, that's time you could be doing something else. And so the robots get you that amount of data back. It's over a hundred data points they're grabbing while the cow's milking. And really that falls back to the same issue that you guys see in all of your industries and we all see it. We're all in charge of getting everyone all this data and then they never do anything with it. So in the robot milking side, the people that really are successful with it are the ones that have adapted kind of the mindset of okay, we're not going to have to manage humans anymore, the you know payroll, all of those things calling in sick, but we are going to have to manage maintenance and taking care of these, and also kind of adapt more of a technology high technology mindset and use this data for good. So that's been, while it's definitely not a revolutionary topic anymore, that's been one of the more commercial successes, I think in ag or dairy specifically.
Speaker 1:There's usually such a big lag between like big new shiny application and some you know forefront technology leader, customer coming out with a success story and then kind of the rest of industry actually adopting it yeah, there's in the majority like that's.
Speaker 1:That, you know, I think takes more years than like you would think as an outsider yeah, I see so many cool engineering videos online and I'm like and then at some point a new story comes out like, oh, we're doing this. And I'm like, didn't I see that on the internet like 15 years ago or 10 years ago? And it was like, yeah, it was new and novel, but it never went into production. Until like now we were just talking about single pair, ethernet oh yeah, with harding and like.
Speaker 1:That's been around for at least a good like five years, but we're now finally at a point where we're seeing like more adoption and it becoming, I guess, more of a standardized thing, um, and we're hoping to see, or likely to see, even more adoption acceleration over the next few years yeah, and that that has actually been driven a little in part by some of the ag innovation.
Speaker 3:I mean, I think the automotive industry has really driven a lot of that as well, because of, you know, cars cannot put the data they need to. They're running multiple can buses now because it's so limited. You need single pair ethernet and of course, the distance limit isn't an issue on a car, but the ag world is that way too. So we've had fully autonomous tractors for well over a decade and of course there's, you know, the prototypes look great, they do everything well and there's a lot of refinement behind that. But then there's the regulatory side of it of who's, how are we going to move these? Who's gonna be in charge of it? So to this day, most new tractors you buy will do an entire field all by themselves.
Speaker 3:You're just sitting there to make sure it doesn't screw up and, yeah, and there's certain things that we haven't crossed the threshold on of of how do you monitor the piece of equipment behind you that it's doing the right job, and some of that issue is the same thing you see in any sort of automation is we try to automate the way we were doing it without rethinking that. Maybe that process isn't the best, most conducive to automation. To begin with, one interesting one in ag is actually apples. So you know how a traditional apple tree grows and it's a three-dimensional problem to pick that tree and you need a ladder and everything. So lately they've all been starting to. There's a trend to grow dwarf trees which grow on a trestle, just like grapevines. And now should you bring in robots later on? It's a two-dimensional problem instead of a or a slightly 3D, but you know it's's.
Speaker 1:It's much easier to solve than a big blooming tree yeah, absolutely, you can have rows and then just, you know, picking on both sides or whatever, versus having to get up in there into each individual. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense sometimes, like reconfiguring our process to be more friendly to automation. Yeah, although I think the humanoid robot industry is really, you know, thinking they're going to come in and just like plant those robots everywhere where our world is not made for automation. Um, do you, are there any thoughts on those sorts of things in the ag industry? Is anybody there thinking about that or laughing at it?
Speaker 3:or like. I haven't seen much at all because the, you know, the and it is the big thing is is centered around these days. I just looked at the numbers. I forget what they were. The man hours that are spent on products lettuce, broccoli and strawberries are three, you know, astronomically high for total man hours spent every year. And there are some robotic broccoli harvesters.
Speaker 3:It's a tricky product to harvest. One of the big issues you have in automating like something like a fresh produce of broccoli, sweet corn lettuces. When they pick it in the field, you know they wrap that head or they put it in the box and that's the same exact box that goes to the grocery store. Nobody ever touches it again. So so there's been some attempts of well, why don't we go through a mass, harvest it and then automate the sortation? But now you just brought all that extra product back for no reason and now you need this big sorting line and that costs money and takes up space and it still screws up and you still got to get it in the box and get it to the store. So it's really the. You know, not every worker is going to grade that product identical, which is a major flaw of the system. But to have a humanoid walk a field and cut a broccoli plant with a broccoli knife, I don't think that's going to be the answer, especially with the distance they got to walk.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Maybe I don't know.
Speaker 3:It could.
Speaker 2:I'm thinking.
Speaker 3:I'm sure someone will try and it could. Maybe not a fully humanoid robot, but one of the trends we have seen with ag stuff and there's people on both sides of it is, as years have gone on, ag equipment's gotten larger and larger because you need to maximize how much one person can do, and we're up to 700 and some horsepower tractors now and they're kind of keep saying, well, we can't really go much bigger than this because it can't fit in one piece on a semi trailer to get to the farm anymore, and so that's been a limitation and road sizes and things like that, which we're a little more open than countries like Europe, but it's starting to become an issue. So the trend has been towards let's make these autonomous. Well, one big autonomous machine has a lot of downsides, so it's been finding that right size of. Instead of planting 48 rows of corn with a robot, why don't we have 12 robots? Plant six rows? If I did my math right I don't think I did, maybe, and so that could be the humanoid side or a chunk of the humanoid.
Speaker 3:You know that arm, the manipulation to grab the product that may transition over. I currently, like some of the Apple ones and stuff, have a little suction cup on these. You know arms that are doing some different things. They're not like a fully six axis type arm, they're still kind of on a cartesian plane, but, um, that that's been one way they've tried to solve that. But, yeah, you really do need kind of the ambit, uh, or the dexterity I mean of to get in and actually get that plant, and it's a challenge way above my head, um, but it is interesting to watch how they kind of uh do that. Uh, actually, on that note, there is one I know that um picks, travels along the berries, I think, and is kind of an arm that comes in and picks them. So they got half of a human right that kind of linear.
Speaker 1:If you have any kind of trellis or whatever, yeah, you could. I think there's some more. You know more stuff that can be done there. I wonder about teleoperation Is there anything like that happening? Because I know sometimes conditions in the field, like weather it can be really hot In some cases there may be like pesticides in the field that are not great for people that are coming in. Is there any merit to that, like somebody being able to you get that human judgment, I guess, but they don't have to be out there, yeah they have.
Speaker 3:There's varying levels of that. Now Most of the almost all the equipment you can buy new now has telematics Sometimes, whether you want it or not, sometimes the manufacturer forces it on you and they. So what that's kind of allowed is is especially like with something like a combine where you are harvesting grains and there's a lot of settings to adjust and you just only you need somebody to sit in the seat, but someone that's skilled enough to really make those judgments as a high value operator. You want elsewhere sometimes, and so what they've done is is multiple ways of say you're a farmer in a big, vast area like Canada or Australia. You can daisy chain your settings of your combine to the three, four or five other ones in the field with you. Other ones are more just. You're sitting at your office and managing the machines as they're spread out and through the vision systems they have installed on some of these now you can make those adjustments remotely to some extent.
Speaker 3:You know there's sometimes you still got to walk behind the combine and see what's coming out the back. But um, there's, there's attempts to move that forward and of course teleoperation does exist. I don't know if it's really commercially available yet for ag. I know they do it. Um, I think I saw cat does it for um, the, the wheel loaders that are at the ports scooping out container ships or not container ships, obviously, but bulk cargo ships Um, they only run so often there's a guy sits in a booth in Missouri and he can run one in the West coast and then run, run on the East coast. Whoever needs them next. He can run one in the West Coast and then run one on the East Coast, whoever needs them next.
Speaker 2:That's pretty cool.
Speaker 2:I was going to ask if you've ever heard of Flexiv Not that they're doing anything specifically in ag, but like that's them.
Speaker 2:Flexiv Robotics is trying to replicate the human wrist and so they have all these extra sensors that I would think could, you know, help with ag. But at the same time, I had, you know, I've had a conversation with people that you know are used to come from farms and he was like, yeah, but for how much? Because, like, some of these labor forces are coming from not this country, come over the border and produce all this and, you know, do all of this stuff that that they've been doing for generations. And then, you know, then saying, his argument was that we'll never have how much is this robot? How much is this, you know? Because because the farmers are never going to go for that robot, um, because they still have this workforce available, Um, and it's going to be less. The workforce is less, um, unless you know, unless you can figure out what that ROI looks like and I don't, it's harder to convince, I think, um, at least the farmers that are, you know, using that labor.
Speaker 3:Right, yeah, and that and that is if you, if you get into produce, especially because those, the migrant labor force is on a it's a seasonal program, so industries like dairy and stuff kind of struggle because they're 365, but then, but yeah, with with fresh produce it's it's seasonal, so migrant is pretty prevalent there and a lot of them same exact people come back every single year. But that's not a cheap labor force at all. It actually is pretty expensive. You have to pay all everything for their transportations and stuff to get them here. They have, I believe, the Washington minimum wage for H2As, over $20, you know, relative to the cost of living, of course, um, none of the. I think the lowest H2A minimum wage is double the actual minimum wage. And then you have to provide all the housing, uh, transportation, um, there may even be a meal requirement. There's a there's a lot of regulations on the housing, um, so it's, it's, it's certainly a tool in their toolbox and it toolbox and it's a necessary.
Speaker 3:It's one that they've kind of the industry has settled on as how to bridge this gap from what we were 50 years ago, when it was a bunch of people picking their own products, to trying to grow and drive the keep the food. I mean really we have the cheapest food in the world and it's kind of driven by that. But the labor pool and the cost of labor is growing, which does bring in opportunities for automation. And I think the picking at the field level may be the last one. The stuff that we're doing is all at the packing house side and trying to help with the labor situation there. But that does bring up a good point of the cost.
Speaker 3:And where we got a lot of traction in that industry is understanding it's seasonal. This stuff has four months that it runs out of the year, so you can't put the biggest name, latest and greatest plc in there. Uh, it needs to hit a price point. If you show up with that, with that certain you know one of those certain big brands, you all the they're not even going to look um. So it's understanding that they really have that target. That ROI is has to be in a short amount of time. They're working on kind of a limited budget but but still being able to have enough at the end of the day that you can be successful as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I worked for a while with Festo out in Northern California and, like Salinas, was my territory, so a lot of lettuce packing going on there A lot. But I didn't know this until I kind of got down there, that the seasons they have Yuma, arizona, and then the Salinas California area and their seasons are slightly different, and so they will pack up the whole lines and take it down to Arizona during that time and then pack them back up, because I guess there's just like those two places and kind of the two different seasons.
Speaker 1:Primarily, and Mexico fills in when those two are out of season for lettuce. Oh, okay, yeah, I guess some of them are probably transporting that machinery then down there.
Speaker 3:Some do. Some have separate operations down there, but then they're able to stagger their season a little to where they do. They'll move the cooling equipment. And now these, these are not easy to move. I mean a vacuum cooler. It takes a few semis to move and it's a 500 horsepower ammonia refrigeration skid. You know these. It's a big chore, but uh, the the traveling cooling systems were very big the past 30 or plus years. Um, to try and spread that cost, uh to the point, a number of the packagers and growers actually started their own cooling companies to cool for others. And and as as the industry is consolidated, as industries do, uh, more people have just kind of been able to afford to leave their systems a little more permanent. But but yeah, it is still still common to move them around to try and offset that cost of, you know, a vacuum tube, like I said, it's a couple of million dollars and and it doesn't make you any money when it's just sitting for eight months out of the year.
Speaker 1:Yeah, have you seen any other kind of um applications that maybe, uh, farmers are like co-opping or I guess I'm thinking of, like in napa valley, for instance, a lot of smaller winemakers.
Speaker 1:they don't bottle, they don't have bottling lines so they're like mobile bottling trucks that will come during bottling season or whatever that time is, and they'll just, you know, pull up to one of these wineries and bottle all their barrels and then move on to the next one. Is there any technology like that, other than like the lettuce or the stuff that we just talked about moving, because I know, like in the ag industry, there are a lot of co-ops for certain things, right?
Speaker 1:Right Like dairy farms, a lot of them co-op, like they sell all their milk together as a group to grocers or something like that. Can you talk a little bit about that? I'm just always interested in, like the applications of sharing and community in different industries.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, there's one that we've been involved in recently. That's not anything super glamorous, but it is an example of it. It's not anything super glamorous, but it is an example of it is there's a push for feed. The feeds that get fed to animals are constantly evolving and there's a mix of byproducts and different ways to feed them, and one that's been discovered is that dry, fine ground corn seems to be one of the better ingredients for high producing dairy cows. So there's been a huge push up here. Everybody wants fine ground corn. It's also logistically easier because you can buy and sell dry corn. It's a lot harder to buy and sell wet corn because that only happens in the fall when you harvest it. So the cost to put in, you know you put in this milling system to generate this, but there again it sits for a lot of the year. So we've been automating a lot of those mills to run fully autonomously. Pretty much lights out. And then what some of these people are doing is putting in extra bins where they'll make product for other local farmers and sell to them, and then our system just detects once they pick up their load it'll refill it and kind of go from there. So that that's kind of a small scale way of just. You know it's usually one to five at the most. You know, kind of together. I don't know that, I don't know any of them are necessarily pooling resources to build one. Some might, but a lot of them it's. You know I'm going to be the one I'm going to build it, I'm going to charge you this amount of money type of thing, uh.
Speaker 3:And then, as you mentioned, the cooperative thing has been part of ag forever. So a lot of the inputs that farmers buy the seeds, the fertilizers and things all come through cooperatives. And then um, dairy, a lot of them are in co-ops. The dairy I grew up on um there's. Their milk goes to private processor but there's still a co-op kind of that they're a part of and that comes back to actually almost the opposite of what you were talking about.
Speaker 3:We're starting to see some of in dairy around here. The past decade or so is people starting to do some of their own processing, people starting to do some of their own processing. If you're near a large metro area, there's a big demand for locally produced stuff where people can come out and look at your cows and so that has helped some people that's a much higher profit margin than you would get selling it as a commodity. Naturally you have a lot of overhead in doing that, but that is something people have done, and the same thing that you mentioned with the wine growers. If someone is new and making their own cheese, they'll sometimes go to a smaller cheesemaker and just have them private label something for them, because the licensing and regulations is a lot of work and a lot of risk to invest all that up front.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I'm going to connect that point back to come to OT Skatecon, so that you can find other automation professionals that you can collaborate with If there are things that either you are not big enough to handle or areas that are adjacent to things. You know what are you going to be talking about at OT Skatecon, vinny, and why should people want to? I don't know. Yeah, what are they going to hear about that? Maybe they can reach out to you or consider you a resource on in their business going forward.
Speaker 3:Right, I'm listed as talking about ag automation, so probably a few of the things we've talked about here today, and of course I have some natural other things of just how to navigate the world, of trying to do your own automation thing, and a lot of that has been around how to kind of create your own little market that doesn't exist, and uh, of course people can always ask me technical questions, but uh, I'm no, I'm no expert there, I just have my opinions.
Speaker 1:So it looks like we're about, uh, getting close to an hour here. So, allie, whatever, what?
Speaker 2:other questions do you have? Sure, so when I start I have a chemical engineering background and my first process engineering job was growing algae, and so we got like crazy into like, uh, greenhouse automation, and so there's just so much um that we used to look at there and then we would try to grow it with lights and like. So I know about vertical farming and like, I guess, have you gotten into any of that stuff Like or uh, have you do? Do any of your current customers experiment, uh with some of that stuff? Um, and you know, does that stuff interest you? And like, how has it changed? I guess? Cause it's been. It's been like 10 years for me since I touched greenhouse automations.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's been like 10 years for me since I touched greenhouse automations.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and it does in a way. A lot of that was all you know. The big push of the vertical stuff was a lot of venture backed and there's people then that were also getting back to create a system for those and, like we all know, you know if you can build enough of something. It's substantially cheaper to build a microcontroller of your own design versus using a PLC. So it's to hit that price point for ag. But the vertical thing is a bit of a topic in the ag world. It's a contested topic because there's people that see it as the way of the future and there's people that see it as actually incredibly inefficient and unsustainable. So somewhere in the middle is probably where that is. I don't deal with any true vertical farms. I deal with people that grow in high tops and things like that of greenhouses, but nothing that is a true thing you see, of a farm downtown New York City with nothing other than water and somehow they get all of their inputs in there and it's better for the environment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think oftentimes there's a lot of like hidden costs and things like that. Like, oh, we're going to save a lot on this. And then you're like, oh, but unintended consequences, now we have. It is or negatives or whatever right.
Speaker 3:And even you know in my area land is $20,000 an acre for decent land and that's incredibly expensive, but compared to a vertical farm it's still some of the cheapest area you can grow a crop.
Speaker 1:Well, give a plug for well, I don't really have really the name, but I might share something more about it next time I visit Iceland. But I have someone in my extended family that I actually haven't met in person, but he's the co-founder of a company where they're building autonomous farms inside of containers. In Iceland, our climate, it's very barren and it's very cold in the wintertime. We don't grow a whole lot of things other than greenhouse.
Speaker 1:We do well with cucumbers and tomatoes and lettuce and a few other things. But the idea here is that you can have a kind of self-sustaining little autonomous thing that makes food in remote local villages and stuff like that that don't have access to fresh produce, especially not in the winter time. We have to, like, import a lot of stuff, uh, and so then it's not necessarily about cost effectiveness but about access yeah um.
Speaker 1:So I think that that could be like a reasonable application of something like a vertical farming or a, you know, container farming is where you don't have access to land, um, or land that has conditions to grow things.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that is a great application for it.
Speaker 1:And then one that I heard about recently and I don't really know enough about it to say anything was somebody that is trying to grow produce in containers at sea.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 1:So that's new, and I don't have much to say about it other than that's interesting.
Speaker 2:They need the produce, those like squid farmers that are out there for like two years.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't know that they're thinking about putting it on boats where people are, but rather the farm itself just being out on the water. In the water? I'm not sure.
Speaker 2:I don't remember specifically what the reason was. They need to grow food on there. That's a pretty good idea, because they don't let them off to go get more vegetables, so they die of B12 poisoning. No B12 deficiency.
Speaker 1:Well, back in the day it was scurvy.
Speaker 3:It was.
Speaker 1:Holly yesterday was eating a lime. So she squeezes the lime, she licks the lime, she drinks the juice I'm Mexican and then she just like flipped it open and just like ate the rest of it. And we're trying to. We were just at a conference. We're trying to prevent getting sick because we got like conference season and vitamin C is a huge thing and I didn't know until at some point in my adult life that scurvy is vitamin C deficiency and it was because all these people were just on a boat for months and didn't eat anything fresh. So yeah, one last tangent, I guess for the fun of the conversation. So with that, Vinny, is there anything that you want to ask or talk about that we didn't cover or that came to your mind? Before we do the standard last question and then sign off.
Speaker 3:I think we covered some pretty pretty interesting topics today cool.
Speaker 1:Then my last question is can you tell us where people can find you reach out to you if they have any questions? I projects when I work with you where you are your username on the forums or on Reddit. No, just kidding. Yeah, Give us all the things that you want to tell people to pay attention to and then if you have anything cool coming up that we should be looking out for and we'll make sure to share. On Automation Ladies.
Speaker 3:The easiest place is really LinkedIn these days, probably just my name, and I do try to keep the company website updated with some of our recent projects. Most of the projects we do are at farms, so we usually don't have any restrictions on sharing a lot of what we do, which is a pretty nice spot to be in, yeah that's huge.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know a lot of people in other industries are envious of that because they're like I do a lot of cool stuff but it's under nda yeah, yeah, that's a.
Speaker 3:It's not a big thing we run into. We do have some, but it's not a lot. So that's that's the best place to try to try to keep those areas updated as much as as possible.
Speaker 2:Um what kind of industries do care about that? Or what type of um farmers do care about hiding some of that? Um, not a lot like where's the highest tech stuff going on in ag?
Speaker 3:there's nothing. There's nothing that fancy going on. Uh, there is no, nobody's called me to be a part of it, at least. Um, so no, there, I mean there is. You know, naturally, if you do some work for some multinational oems which would do some support with some of them, um, it's just kind of their standard practice. So that's the only time we really run into it at the farm side, I mean, if I don't know if anyone comes. It seems like an ag in a lot of ag situations that I've had, if someone comes up to with doing the true more industrial integration stuff, just not something we ever get involved with, because ours is right at the right at the customer's side and kind of customized for them. We're not developing some fancy autonomous robot type stuff.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, all right. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. People can connect with Vinny because you probably found out about this episode on LinkedIn or if you're listening in your car through and you got it, you know, from iTunes or whatever. You can head over to automationladiesio If you want to connect with Vinny. We'll have a link to his LinkedIn profile and we'll try to feel free to keep in touch and update. If you have any future projects or links that you want to publicize, we can put them on your profile to keep that up to date. And, yeah, this was a lot of fun. Thank you so much for chatting with us and we look forward to seeing you in July. And then, anytime you have like a super cool application that you are allowed to share, feel free to hit us up so that we can share that with our audience, cause, especially like videos of anything getting made that we all eat, I think, like all of us nerds would love to see that.
Speaker 3:So absolutely thanks for having me all right, thank you.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest of your day.
