Hey, welcome everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in the Palo Alto studio. It's actually the last day that we're going to be in our old Palo Alto studio. We're moving to our new studio next week, which we're pretty excited about. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE and we're going to have a CUBE conversation today with David G, the CMO of Zora. Dave, welcome. Well, great to be here. Thank you and great to be here on the last day. Yeah, and I hear you guys are moving offices too. So it's something in the air. That's right. This weekend we're moving to our new headquarters as well across the street from where we were pretty much in San Mateo. Right, right. And Happy New Year. Did New Years go well for you? Yeah, all good. All good. Ready to take 2017 by storm. Okay, great. So Zora's an interesting company. You guys have been at it for a while, but for those that aren't familiar with the company, you're very, very focused on a very specific thing. And I wonder if you can give people kind of an overview. Yeah, so a quick kind of snapshot on us is we've been around for about seven, eight years. We're about 600 employees. About 800 customers today. We've raised close to a quarter of a billion dollars of venture funding over a series of rounds. And we're very focused on delivering value to an emerging space, which is this movement, the shift to a subscription economy. As more and more businesses and consumers move from the world of owning products to subscribing to services, whether in your personal life or in your business life, we've built a platform, a cloud-based platform that is a subscription relationship management platform for businesses to deliver what they do as services, as subscriptions to their customers, their subscribers, whether they are consumers like you and I, or other businesses. Right, so I love the music industry as kind of the proxy, if you will, of how things move and change. And to see what happened versus digitization with iPods and what Apple did, but then really the subscription-based flip that Apple missed really, that Spotify has really grabbed hold of as kind of a nice proxy to see what happens when you shift from really a product model to a services model. So it's a completely different game changer and they're grabbing off the traffic now because now I subscribe to the service and I have infinite music versus buying one track at a time. Yeah, so at the end of the day, it comes back to owning the subscriber ID. So in your example about Spotify, and then we'll move on to Apple, Spotify knows a lot about you. You're paying them a certain number of dollars a month. You may have a family plan where you have the kids on there as well. Sometimes you might add your kids.  Or expand your family and we don't know about it. Maybe something like that. But Spotify knows a tremendous amount about you and your family in this case and what your listening preferences are. And they can curate and customize a very unique experience specifically for you. Now let's talk about Apple for a minute. If you were to look back at Apple three, four, five years ago, you would make the case it was a hardware business with some services associated with it. And in fact, the big flip in calendar 2016 for Apple was that services revenue number has grown to be a material and meaningful part of their revenue growth and certainly their profit engine. As the number of net new iPhone sales has begun to decline, that growth number has begun to shrink, the monetization of those iPhones using your Apple ID has grown exponentially. So you're in their Apple iCloud, for example, you might have iTunes and their music service, you might be storing your photos in their cloud and their ecosystem. And so the dollars that they are grabbing from you or you're subscribing to have increased pretty significantly and you could make a case that really they're now increasingly in the subscription business. Well, what's interesting about the subscription business is you touch on so many mega trends and you just talked about three or four of them. One is cloud, right? Cloud really enables you now to deliver a service via a mobile phone to anyone anywhere with basically unlimited capabilities behind that application on the phone. So that's a big one. You talked about data and now having such a more robust stream of data on the activity and the consumption of the person that you're serving that you just didn't have before when you shipped a product to your distributor, they shipped it to the retailer, somebody bought it, maybe they send in a card, maybe they don't send a card net, but now you know exactly how people are using your product. But what's even more interesting is the relationship is an ongoing, constantly touching, never ending connection between the service and the company behind the service and the client, very different kind of a model. So that's exactly right. And in fact, that creates a whole different business model. And for companies here in the Bay Area as an example, probably bleeding edge, anybody who's building a new business today is almost certainly, particularly in the software or in the entertainment space, is not delivering a product, you're delivering a subscription based service. And so those born on the cloud businesses require you to have an intimate relationship with who you're using your subscriber is going to be.  The other thing that happens is there's a tremendous amount of analytical data that's now generated. Those phones you talk about are generating in your Spotify example, lots of data about your music habits, but think about all those devices that are in your home, your thermostats, your cameras and the like. And then we can talk about transportation as another leading indicator here. All of those are delivering enormous amounts of telemetry data. You marry that with your subscription data and you have a tremendous insight into what value can be delivered and upsold into your customer set or your subscriber. And that's a very different model to your point of going to the hardware store and buying some thing that you plug in, that's a coffee machine or your oven or some physical capital expenditure asset. The model is going to change where more and more of those are going to be devices that you're going to subscribe to over time. It changes the model. And they would shoot me if I didn't mention Uber in an interview probably in 2017, but that shows really the difference between ownership versus using it as a service and what a fundamentally different relationship it is when I just need to get someplace and it's just as easy to use my phone, something comes and picks me and drops me off where I want to go versus managing a car. And that's exactly right. And so if you're one of a large auto manufacturers today, you're looking at that going in a world where potentially there's multiple generations who this is maybe the last generation is going to own vehicles. You're going to just subscribe to transportation. Uber is clearly at the leading edge of that, but those vehicles become autonomous or you want to subscribe to fractional ownership of vehicles or things like that, parking spaces, bicycles in the cities, all of those are going to require a subscription relationship management platform to deliver those services to folks like you and I and the next generation behind us. So another huge impact here is the way that you deliver your services in terms of designing them versus when you were designing a product.  And while agile has been in software development for a long time and people talk about DevOps, really thinking of that in a more holistic way about going to market, this enables you to do that that you just couldn't do before. And I was looking, preparing for this, looking at some of the keynotes from last year's from your show and is it great, Grace? The example is fantastic, and I'll let you tell the story, but they basically came to a new country and rather than doing the PRD and the MRD and making this huge investment up front, they use a subscription connection with their customer base and an agile methodology to basically create a US based version of what had been really a UK service. So that's exactly right. So if you think about how we've traditionally built product, go out and do a bit of research, get some materials together, put it into our ERP system, manufacture something, put it into a distribution network, have it shipped to a retailer, the retailer sells it and you might get some insight into who that end user is, but you really don't get a whole heck of a lot of feedback in any of that loop, right? So that's a very linear process. In the world of subscriptions, the consumer, the subscriber is right at the center of that and you have enormous flexibility to create experiences that are unique and curated. So in the case of snacks on demand, which is what this one is, and there's lots of food delivery services that do this as well, the ability to be able to show up and curate an experience that is specific to you, using the data that you're getting from your early adopter subscribers and then extrapolate that out to other markets is incredibly valuable and takes multiple steps out of it and gives you instantaneous feedback and that's the key in a subscription economy is that you're getting this regular data-driven feedback loop as to what's working and what's not, who your most profitable and loyal subscribers are, who your least profitable or most likely to churn and it's a whole different set of metrics and it's a whole different vocabulary and it has pretty profound impact on if you're an established business making this transformation, what your P&L and your business metrics are as well. So there's just tremendous transformation that's taking place, not just in snacks on demand and music and entertainment but large software and technology companies who are making this transformation, transportation companies who are making this transformation, we're seeing all kinds of innovative use cases that are being driven by a need to transform and really understand who your end user is and the change in the business model from delivering something like a jet engine or a car as a large capital expenditure but shifting that to being an operating expense a shift from ownership to subscription. Right, and before we get into the transformations I want to drill down that. I just want to make sure we're clear that this is not just a B2C thing and you just talked on a couple of great examples, cars, automotive, GE who wants to get out of the jet engine business and get into the thrust business if you will and I think Amazon, Amazon Web Services specifically Andy Jassy and team have really demonstrated that this is something you learned in business school, right? You don't want to compete on undifferentiated heavy lifting let the specialists do that. We've been using ADP forever. I don't know why ADP doesn't get more pub as the first kind of application service provider that all B2B companies have used but AWS has shown, move it from CapEx to OpEx, use what you need when you need it, spin it up, spin it down and really change the way that now people think of IT delivered as a service really enabled by cloud and so it isn't just a B2C thing this whole subscription economy and the value delivered via a subscription business model. I think that's right. I think there's a couple of thoughts in there. One is the metric of delivery has changed pretty dramatically in the world of Amazon you can spin up, spin down a set of capacity and the infrastructure enables you to be elastic in how you do that and charge for it in an on-demand world and you have to have a very flexible infrastructure to do that and same as no company today would go build their own payroll system, I would say you're not gonna go out and build your own email system you're not gonna build your own ERP or customer relationship management system in a world that's moving to a subscription economy you wanna be working with businesses who wake up every day who know as much about this as possible and are delivering a platform that is specifically designed for that which is a new and emerging kind of daylight space as these transformations take place. Okay, so I wanna dig into the transformation thing a little bit, cause we talk often on theCUBE about people processing tech it's never the tech is the hardest part it's always the people in the process. So I wonder if you can share some examples and once it jump into my mind maybe you do or don't have data on it is obviously like Adobe went with Creative Cloud from a very expensive subscription you would just find your friends that worked there in December, hope they hadn't used their two buys a year please can you buy me Creative Cloud for 800 bucks? They moved to a subscription obviously Office 365 is probably one that jumps into everyone's head who's familiar with Microsoft Office. So when a company is going to make this transformation A, how do they do it successfully? Is it eat the elephant one bite at a time? What type of support do they need? And then from the back and in the metrics and what they're measuring their KPIs how does that get executed? And then when they finish, what's the aha that they had no idea that they suddenly discovered? So that's a lot of moving parts. I think Adobe is probably the poster child for it that they changed the P&L and if you look at their market cap today versus the peak of when they were at their license revenue numbers, their market cap today is significantly higher. And part of that is engaging with investors and communicating this transformation that's taking place. It has to be tops down. They get the elephant as a whole and we're seeing that in a couple of the large technology companies that we're engaging with today who are doing exactly that. Probably the, our poster child for that is Symantec who you would think of, they're a security antivirus you would think of the Northern business but they own a number of other businesses as well. They are going through a massive transformation today which is exactly moving from perpetual on-prem don't know who my end user is calling on them once a year to putting almost all of their products and their capabilities through a subscription billing relationship management experience. And so in order to do that, that has to come tops down. It is something that you take on across an organization. It's a, not something you would do half-hearted, right? It's pretty binary, it's all or nothing. And we're seeing that take place in lots and lots of different businesses. Another one would be one of the large manufacturers of earth-moving equipment. So there's a handful of those and we're not ready to come out and tell you exactly who it is but it's a small universe. It's probably yellow or green or orange. It's a small universe. And in their world, their use case is they don't actually know who the end user is past the dealership for certain parts of this business. And these are massive pieces of equipment that send up enormous telemetry data. And they're gonna move to a subscription model for part of that telemetry and be able to monetize that telemetry in ways that they've never been able to go do before. Other examples are heating and lighting controls in buildings. So when you show up in a building or you're building a new building, wouldn't it be better to have your heating and lighting as a service versus paying the CapEx that's involved in putting in all of that infrastructure to drive economic efficiency and drive a different cash flow model? All of those things are happening today in multiple different ways. What do you see happen? So it starts from above, it kind of goes down through the sales and the marketing mechanism is a way to go to market. When that flows back up into the project management, that's gotta be a complete disruption. Yes, what it delivers to product management is far greater insight into usage of the solution. Right, because it flips it, right? It flips it from working on a whiteboard to three of us together on a Friday afternoon to actually listening to our customer behavior. And in the end, what it also allows is enormous pricing flexibility. Whereas in a historical one-time delivery of a software package or a building or a large tractor, it was a kind of very singular pricing experience. With delivering as a subscription, you have a lot of flexibility to experiment with pricing and packaging by region, by territory, by demographic. There's lots of opportunity to be much more thoughtful about how you price and package for particular marketplaces. And you can do it by cohort, you can do it by all manner of different ways. And you can do like what, I mean, people are used to airlines now, right? No two seats are the same price, and now you start to apply that to lots of different areas. And you have the flexibility to absolutely do dynamic pricing. Oh, actually, you're somebody who hasn't interacted with us for the last 30 days, maybe we come back to you with a special offer in some shape or form because we know that today. Right, right. It's a fascinating topic and I think, well, you think like Symantec, I thought I was already paying that thing monthly, but it's slowly getting bigger and larger. And really it's just focused on services delivery versus buying that box at the retail store, right? And for large enterprise, what you tend to find is large numbers of disparate ERP systems at the back end and no real understanding of who the customer is. When you move to a world of subscription, the customer, the subscriber is at the center. And that creates all manner of transformation opportunities to be a lot more efficient and really understand the usage and the needs of a customer. Okay, and the traditional CRM systems are kind of tied back to the traditional ERP system, very single transaction based, not really designed for this kind of ongoing iterative and two-way relationship. I always describe it as, in a world where you have a CRM and ERP almost every mid to large size organization has those in some shape or form, they're very order-driven, right?  And it's a very linear set of activities that are handled at one end by your CRM organization, the CRM systems, and at the other end by your ERP systems. In the world of subscriptions, it's very non-linear, it's very event-driven.  All of those things are event-driven and that non-linear world is not a world where ERP and CRM have the capabilities to handle. So we built Zora and we built this subscription relationship management platform specifically to handle those things. I just think of the classic kind of big data, schema on read versus schema on write. You guys are really schema on read, right? And adjusting based on whatever the behavior is or what you're gonna execute. And that requires a different object model, a very different data model that is unique to this particular set of business processes, exactly. Dave, fascinating conversation and I know you guys have a big show coming up, I'll let you get a plug-in for your show for people that wanna learn more because it is a really interesting way and like you said, there's a lot of old school businesses, old line, old line business that see the value of this new way to interact with their customers via a service model on an ongoing basis versus sell something to the distributor. So thank you for the opportunity to do that. So we run our annual user conference which is subscribed. It's gonna be the first week of June in San Francisco. It's grown exponentially over the last few years. We're excited to host probably close to two plus thousand of our loyal customers but it's a great opportunity to learn CFO metrics. We have sessions for product management. We have sessions for finance. We have sessions for IT. So if you're in any of those organizations and you're thinking about how to do that transformation whether you're a large company beginning to think this through a mid-sized highly transactive business or you're emerging you've raised a few million dollars or tens of millions of dollars of venture funding and you're building a new service. Zora is a great place to learn how to go do that. And I would also make a plug that Zora.com has enormous amounts of resources and a place we call the Academy where you can learn about metrics and go to market and drivers that are enabling this big transformation to the subscription economy. Yeah, exciting times. Well, David, thanks for taking a few minutes to stop by. Thank you for having us. Absolutely. David G, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. We'll catch you next time. Thanks for watching.


Everyone, welcome to the afternoon sessions of the Farmers' Forum. My name is David Trinklein. I'm on the faculty of the Plant Sciences University of Missouri. It's my pleasure to moderate the first three hours' worth of sessions. To begin with, I would like to introduce my colleague, Dr. Sanjian Gu, who is a vegetable extension specialist as well as a faculty member at Lincoln University in Jefferson City. Before Dr. Gu arrived in Missouri, I don't think many Missourians at least heard of the concept of vegetable grafting, much less tomato grafting. Since his arrival, it's been kind of a standard best management practice. And today he's going to give us an update on some of the research he's been carried out in grafting. Dr. Gu. Thank you, Dave. I give one presentation before, I mean this morning for the seminar. This morning I talked about, hold on, let me move to the other one. You can see the outline over there, this is for today, whole day. So this morning I talked about the introduction part, what, why, and then we talked about how. And this afternoon I'm going to talk about my research at Lincoln University. Before we start, for those who were not able to make my presentation, I do have a hand out, which is actually a newsletter, articles. And my two assistants, Sean and Katherine, are going to distribute them to you, there should be two, there should be three articles, but I'm still working on the third one. So the first one is introduction about vegetable grafting. The second one is about tomato grafting. This morning I discussed in detail about how to do grafting in general, not only for tomatoes, but also for pepper, for eggplants, for watermelon, cucumber, and cucumber-based stuff. So if you are interested in my presentation, send me emails so I can send you a PDF version. So just give you a pre-warning, this afternoon's talk will be my research update and it will be really dry. So you'll see a lot of figures in the graphics stuff, so it's not going to be so colorful with pictures like this morning. And also, I wasn't able to get all the data analyzed for this year. We made some mistake there by not including the controls. So the result will be primarily from last year. But you'll find what we did last year. How many of you have attended my seminar this morning? Okay, so how many of you think you are very confident with grafting part already? One hand, two hands, three hands, pretty good. So like I said, today, this afternoon will be a research update. I will not give you a lot of information about the general grafting technology stuff. It will be just some research, okay? Again, my name is Sanjun, and Sanjun Gu, I'm always at Lincoln University Extension. I have been in Missouri for almost five years now. Time just passes fast. Okay, what we did last year, we did two research projects. Number one is the grafting compatibility study with heirloom tomatoes, because we now introduced the idea to our farmers about tomato grafting. They always ask me questions, whether, you know, if I have heirloom, can I just go try them? You know, do you have any research data to see what they're going to take? Because you put two things together, there's a good chance they will not take. So that's the reason behind this research. Of course, people are interested in high tunnel or filled heirloom tomato production, especially for organic or for farmer's markets. So that's why I did this research. And for those of you who don't really know about grafting yet, I can tell you some advantage. Number one, you'll have disease, especially soil-borne disease resistance, because of the rootstock. And number two, if you choose a good rootstock, you usually have enhanced vigor, and your yield usually be enhanced, you'll be increased. And also, high tunnel has been getting popular, and we use high tunnel for season extension, especially in early fall or early spring or later spring. So we want to catch maybe two more months time to produce more warm seeding vegetables, as well as some of the cold seeding vegetables. So grafting with correct rootstock, you do enhance your scion-coated hardness. So just some background information for you. Okay, for this research, what we did, this is just an introduction part. We don't have to go through this again. What we did last year, we chose about 21 heirloom tomatoes, and we grafted them on two rootstocks, Billfort and Maxifort. So we used the tubing grafting method. We tried all those heirloom tomatoes. You can see some of them, like a Kentucky beef steak, brandy wine, pink heart. I like this one, actually. So what we did briefly, we used the tubing method. This shows you how you do it. And for those of you who went to my talk this morning, it should look familiar. This picture was from, those pictures were from Dr. Revert from Kansas State University.  You cut your rootstock either before or up below or over the cutting landings. I prefer this one because later you don't have to remove suckers. And put a tube on it. This is called a tube grafting method because the tubes were designed specifically for this method.  And you slide this in, make sure the two surfaces contact each other. And that'll be it. Of course, later you have to move it into your growth chamber to heal them. So basically for this acclimation process, for day one to three, you keep to close to 100% darkness and close to 100% humidity. And after three days, you slowly reduce the darkness and keep relatively high humidity. And then after seven to 10 days, they are as normal if they take. One lesson I learned from this year was the temperature, even though it's not listed here, the temperature plays very important role in the survival. I guess you don't want to keep your temperature before 80 degree Fahrenheit. And room temperature will be actually very nice. The story for my observation was before a meeting, I grafted something for some kids and I just dropped them in my office. And then I came back 70 days later, they all survived without any cover. So that gave me the hint that the temperature is very critical. My office temperature in summertime is about 70 degree or lower. So they survived really well. And the humidity maybe is less than 50. So keep that in mind. Okay, we did the greenhouse research. This is my growth chamber. We did just build some frame and cover with some plastic. That's it. I do have a household. She really the fire inside. This is just to show you the picture of the grafted transplant. And those are survived transplants. So those greenhouse study, I grafted them to see the survival, whether they are successful or not. So here's the result. Like I said, it's all graphic stuff. And this is my heirloom variety. And this is my survival rate. Rate with one is 100%. So this is on Buford, the roof stock Buford. You can see the lowest one is branding one red. It's actually not too bad, 80%. By the way, I grafted all this by myself. It took me a lot of time. So most of them close to 100% take. So it was really, really good. And for Maxiford, however, I did see some difference. And you can see this mortgage lifter. And I don't even know how to read it. The H55, they were particularly low. I tried to find out why it was this low. I guess I probably was just too tired. I don't know. So however, if you see the statistics, you see even those 80% on Buford survival and the 72% on Maxiford by the statistics analysis, they are not significantly different. So even though there are some exceptions there, we will see in general, there was not, at least in the greenhouse setting, incompatibility issue. So which means you can graft them. They can take really well. And they can grow. And then, whether they're going to be OK in the field or not, we don't know. Because earlier, just like the grips, you graft them. They look really well. You plant them.  So we did the greenhouse study just to see whether grafting is successful or not. And then we planted them in the field to test them in the real environment, especially in the open field. And last year was a good year to test because it was hot and dry. So we planted those successfully-survived graphite transplants in the field. This is how we did it. In open field, it was really dry. And we measured the growth in yield. Yield data is not available yet, I believe, because last year, we just didn't have tomatoes. And later in the growing season, and when the weather was cold, and we harvested a lot of green tomatoes, not red ones. So we measured the stem diameter. And then we measured the stem diameter above and below the grafted union, trying to find an index to measure the compatibility. So here's one picture showing this brand new wine pink grafting on Buford. You can see the rows. And here is the grafted union. Here is the grafted union. Here is the grafted union. And some of the plants, we actually planted a little bit too deep. However, you don't see a lot of rows growing out above the grafted union, which was OK. We don't want any rows come out from the sion part, OK? I split this, this is the grafted union. And you see the picture here. You do see kind of a diagonal line here showing the grafted union, but even though it's here, it's showing this. So this one is non-grafted. You see visually, you don't see a lot of difference, which means they do really well. If you see the connection here, this is the sion. This is your rootstock. There's no obvious stop there, even though you can see something there. So I draw a line there just to show the grafted union there. And for stem diameter, we always tell people that if by choosing the good rootstock, your sion growth rigor can be enhanced. So we measure the stem diameter. You can see on Buford or Maxiford, all those stems were bigger than the non-grafted control. So that shows the difference on the thickness of your stem. That's one way to see you have enhanced the vigor. Then for the diameter ratio above and below, of course, non-grafted would be 0. I mean, it would be 1. And for Buford and Maxiford, the grafted union actually did something to the plant. So above the grafted union, it's a little bit thicker than the lower one. Even though visually, by your bare eyes, you don't see the difference, if you measure them with the caliber, you actually see the difference. So we do see some difference over there. And the conclusion here is, well, this is about the greenhouse trial. We had a better luck with Maxiford than Buford. And then we know, I just said that, we had bigger or thicker stems for the grafted ones. So the most important conclusion for this part is grafting compatibility seemed not to be an issue. So at least in the tested 21 varieties. So if you have an heirloom tomato, I'm thinking I'm about maybe 90% sure you will not have incompatibility for tomatoes. The reason incompatibility is so important, just because if you think about it, you do graft watermelon or cucumber or melon. If you add some bitterness to your watermelon, I don't think people will like it. But for tomatoes, I don't think it's a big challenge. So then again, that year, we did some heirloom trial with grafting in the high tunnels. And I have two high tunnels. One is double-year poly. The other one is single-year poly. So we did some research on that. And what we want to do to find out if grafting will enhance the heirloom tomato production in high tunnels. Number two, to find out whether a single-year versus double-year poly will do something to the heirloom tomatoes, especially grafting ones in the high tunnels. And I placed one sentence here. Tomato grafting in the high tunnel could be a perfect combination. The reason behind that, people started to do high tunnels largely because the ARCS got involved. They got involved with the cost-share program. So we have seen a lot high tunnels everywhere almost in the Midwest. So when people try to use new high tunnels, they don't have a list that they don't maybe just beginners like, I don't know. But their soil is kind of new. They don't have a lot of soil-borne disease problems. But in the future, since high tunnel is a little bit costly to build, to maintain, and you give you more money, so you tend to produce more of your cash crop like tomatoes. And the rotation is limited in the high tunnel. And you want to apply more manures or compost. So sooner or later, your soil disease will build up. Your soil salinity may build up if you're not careful enough. So by doing that, you cause a lot of trouble for your production. And then, and you cannot use methyl bromide anymore because it's banned for its environment to damage. So you cannot use fumigant to do that. The new one may not be as well as the one we used before, like methyl bromide, or they may have some environmental issues as well. Or simply because you are organic or a natural farmer, you don't want to do anything with that. So by doing high tunnel, but adapting the grafting technology, you can avoid those fumigation part. So that's what we did. We used two cyan variety. We have ananas in the German pink, two big fruit type variety, pretty good quality. And we grafted them into Buford and Peridor and Maxiford. This year, I wasn't able to find this variety. And for some reason, seed companies don't carry over seeds over years anymore. I don't know why. So I couldn't find this one. For rootstock, I have a Buford and this. And for the combinations, for German pink, I do have a self-grafted German pink as control. I have a non-grafted, grafted on itself as control. But for ananas, I didn't have enough seeds. So that's the combination of grafting, grafted tomatoes. And I can tell you I didn't take this picture. I didn't, really. It's a little fuzzy, but this is German pink. And this is ananas norer. It's very tasty variety. Same thing, we do the tubing grafting method. We grafted in the greenhouse. Last year, we were late. So we planted them in May. Usually, in this area, we will plant them in the high tunnel late week of March or early April. But we were late. We were not getting the seeds in time. For some reason, the seed company agreed to send me the seeds. They forgot to do it. So anyhow, and then the first batch of the grafted stuff, it were killed with one weekend. I guess my technician was not on campus. And the student worker didn't do a good job. They just cooked. When they were in the chamber, so in the greenhouse with the sunlight, with the black stuff on it, they were killed. So people asked me, did you fire your student worker? I said, no, I didn't. I gave him another chance. No story. So this is my high tunnel, 30 by 96, with rich vent. And this is a single layer. This is a double layer. It's a different man's brand. And remember, we are in zone 5B. And like I said, we planted them late. And then we ran right into this heat weather. So for quite a few while, we didn't have a harvest because it was too hot. But however, we kept them there, kept them going until late fall. So we do have some data for last year. And this is how my plants look like. I do have an automatic system to drop the curtain down and up, and also a controller to control the rich vent. So I had a pretty good system to automatically manipulate my temperature just because I cannot be there every day. Neither did my technician. So when I was preparing this talk yesterday, I used one previous presentation. I have the extreme hot and dry summer in 2011. But it wasn't true anymore. This year was even bad. So I removed our word. But still tells you, in late June to almost the early part of August, we have a really, really, to this part as well, really bad weather. And we know that, I think I have another line here. Pretty much here, 75, you see the plant growths for tomatoes get influenced. About 97, I think, pollination will stop. And if it's about 102 degrees, the whole plant may just not grow. So this is especially true for heirloom tomatoes, which primarily is just indeterminate. So you can see, I do have some heat tolerant varieties there. Unfortunately, this is my variety trial part. That's not the grafted part. But other, just like this, for a long time, no fruit because pollination was impossible. So we do see some temperature difference between the two high tunnels. The single layer versus double layer, basically early in the morning, the single layer has a higher temperature. And then the night, the night you double layer has a higher temperature. This is May. And then the PR is from the synthetic activity radiation. You see the difference between the two layer system in the high tunnels. So if you think about maintain the heat in a high tunnel, you may think about using double layer. But in the zone 6B or above, I don't think it's necessary. Just give you some environmental factors there to help explain the result. So for the yield, this is single layer. We have a green German pink, German pink, on German pink, and then on three rootstocks. You see pretty much similar from August here. I didn't have any harvest. And then I do have some harvest starting in the late, early part of October until the frost came, well, not frost. The freeze temperature came in. I was actually in Pennsylvania for a meeting when my technician students harvest those tomatoes. So you see, really, you don't see a lot of big difference. For double layer, you do see some difference here. For this one, the green line is the German pink on Buford. And we always see the maxiford will transform the most vigor to your sion. But under that condition, if it is so hot, Buford is less vigorous rootstock variety. Actually, it did better than others. And for this one, you can see the non-graphic one overall performed the worst. So we still see some difference in double layer polys. For the ananas, you see the similar chain, but you don't see a lot of big difference here. So for the double layer, this one on this emperor door, rootstock did a little bit better than others, similar to this one. So we put this in together for the ananas. German pink, we see very the difference between the rootstock treatment, different rootstock sion combinations. For example, this one, the double layer seems to be better for this one as well, but others may not. So it varies, depends on the variety. But for ananas, the other variety, you see the double layer did better. So we do see the difference between the two types of high tunnels when you graft the tomatoes. So this is the result. Generally speaking, I don't see a lot of difference between the grafted ones and non-graphed ones, even though I think for ananas nor one rootstock variety performed better. And we see the difference, the non-graphed tend to be lower yield. But because the heat last year, it didn't show the potential difference. So I cannot see the significantly different. But in the field, in the greenhouse, I did see that the grafted ones were more vigorous. Here is the arrow sown temperature was different between the single double layer high tunnels. So basically, the take home message for you is grafting can enhance vigor. Number one, number two, the double layer will be better. And whether the grafting had a benefit or advantage on this trial, I cannot tell you. But this year, we may have a better result. However, well, this year, we tried the same variety on different rootstocks, one, two, three, four, five. However, when I was trying to analyze data, found out that the control were not included there. I mean, data was there, but for the arranged data, were not there, so I wasn't able to do the statistical analysis. So I will present the data probably at the Great Plains Conference in January and also going to post the results on our website. So you'll get this sooner or later. OK, this is just a quick update. And again, this is just a research result. I think I have a couple of minutes for questions. Yes? Does Cantaloupe fall in the same category as watermelon? Yeah, his question is whether people have been doing research or demonstration with cucurbit stuff like watermelon and cucumbers. I haven't done this yet. I have collected three cucumber rootstock varieties, which can also be used for watermelon and the melon. So I'm going to do some research with the cucumber, the English cucumber type this year. Dr. Xin Zhao from the University of Florida she's been doing melon cantaloupe grafting study. And there's not a USDA guy doing watermelon. So there's a big, especially crop research initiative grant. It is looking at different aspects of grafting. So that grant started last year. I'm assuming results will start to come out next year. But in China, they graft all watermelons and cucumbers and melons in the greenhouse and high ton of sediments. They are doing great. It's a similar process as melons and cucumbers. Yes, yes. For all cucurbits, the grafting method will be similar. And their results may vary because if you're talking about watermelon and melon, you're talking about the sugar content. So sometimes if you're not careful and choose the wrong variety, the quality may be reduced. However, the research done by USDA people with watermelon, we found out if you grafted them, it enhanced the shelf life. Other questions? The resources were specifics of grafting and planting schedule. Is there any more online resources or books that you might suggest for vegetable grafting in general? There are quite a few publications for farmers. It's extension publications. There are some research projects as well. I know in hard science, in hard technology, there are some publications on grafted tomatoes. And there is a review in hard science on grafted watermelons and other cucurbits. So I don't know how good you are with scientific journal, but at least you can try. If you want to do the scholar.google.com, you can get a lot of scientific information there.


On Thursday, April 11th, the Goodwill Center for Education and Employment hosted their Second Chance Day event. Goodwill and their partners spoke to the public about how they can provide various types of help for those struggling with addiction. Mountaintop News spoke with Pikeville Opportunity Center manager Stephanie Apshire to learn more. Well, the Opportunity Center here in Pikeville is celebrating Second Chance Month, which stems from the Second Chance Act that Congress passed. It's a means of providing support to workers and to prevent recidivism, helping those that may have justice involvement to advance their career, to contribute to the communities. And our partners here today are Second Chance employers that are willing to hire someone that may have those issues, and also partners that help with the other aspects of reentry or recovery. And it's moving people from crisis to stability and self-sufficiency, and that's what we're always about here. It's not a handout, but a handout. And we just want to give a second chance to those that are seeking one. At Audiology Associates of Prestonsburg, you can live your life the way you want and find the freedom of better hearing. With 40 years of being in the hearing care industry, you'll experience patient care that is specific to you with exceptional follow-up care that ensures your hearing and balance needs are being met. Audiology Associates at 1428 Northlake Drive in Prestonsburg. The organizations and individuals involved in Second Chance Day are trying to make a difference in people's lives. It's an ongoing effort that requires time, resources, and the right people. I think we're very lucky here in our area of Eastern Kentucky that we have a lot of companies and partners here that truly care about the individual and care about their success and want our community to uplift and empower. So the people you see represented here, they truly care. They come here once a month on partner day. They're here for the community that comes in the building. We get a lot of foot traffic because this is a business complex. But also, they're here for the clients that come here. And I cannot make it without them. I think that it's all about relationships. It's all about partnerships. You've heard the saying, it takes a village. Well, it takes a village here too. We all have to work together. It's not about competition, but it's totally about collaboration. We all win. Reporting from Outantop News, I'm Nick Column.