AppHarvest, Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by and welcome to the App Harvard's first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only mode. After this previous presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press the start and the one key on your touch-tone telephone. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host for today's call, Travis Parman.

Thank you for joining us for the App Harvest first quarter 2022 earnings call. I'm Travis Parman, Chief Communications Officer for App Harvest. Joining me in Kentucky today are several members of the senior management team, including Jonathan Webb, founder and CEO, David Lee, board member and president, Julie Nelson, Chief Operating Officer, and Lauren Eggleton, Chief Financial Officer. The earnings release and slide presentation are available on our investor website at investors.appharvest.com. On today's call, we'll begin with prepared remarks from the team. Then we'll open the call to questions. Before we start, I'd like to remind you that comments today regarding the company's future business plans, prospects, and financial performance are forward-looking statements that we make pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the securities laws. These statements are made based on management's current knowledge and assumptions about future events, and they involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations. In providing projections and other forward-looking statements, the company disclaims any intent or obligation to update them. For additional information on important factors that could affect these expectations, please see our most recent SEC filings. And now, I'd like to turn the call over to Jonathan. Thanks, Travis.

The App Harvest team delivered on our top priorities for the first quarter. One, ramping up production in the second growing season at our current facility in Moorhead, Kentucky. And two, remaining on track to open three new farms selling salad greens, berries, and additional tomatoes by the end of the year. Through March, we sold nearly 7 million pounds of tomatoes coming from our Moorhead farm for 5.2 million, representing our highest net sales quarter to date. The timeline for opening our new farms is also on schedule and will be a phased approach to ramp up production. We anticipate they will begin contributing to net sales and production beginning in Q3 with Berea that will accelerate in Q4 when Richmond and Somerset are expected to be operational as well. We expect these three farms to, one, accelerate our sales growth, two, enable us to become financially self-sufficient, and three, attract new investment that would allow us to continue to grow our high-tech farm network in Central Appalachia and beyond. We also continue to make progress on FarmCo, our proposed joint venture with Mastronardi to build and operate CEA facilities throughout the U.S. with the potential to significantly expand our footprint nationally. If agreement can be reached, we anticipate top benefits will include improved geographic reach, revenue growth, liquidity, and financing options for continued expansion. As the CEA industry continues to grow at rapid pace, the importance of connecting at-scale produce supply to a world-class distribution network has become more clear. This is something we've had in place with our distribution partner, Mastronardi, since before we went public early last year. As our new farms come online later this year, we believe there's great potential in further leveraging our existing distribution agreement, not only from selling new and higher value crop types, through the Masternardi network, but also from improving ability to ship direct to large national customers such as Wendy's. Shipping direct boosts net sales by saving transportation costs both on the App Harvest and Masternardi side. And it's an option that's increasingly available to us as our quality and execution continue to improve. In fact, our percentage of direct shipments, which used to be in the single digits, was above 20% in the first quarter this year. Finally, we continue to do business in a more sustainable way as one of only a handful of publicly traded public benefit corporations that is also B Corp certified. Last month, we received preliminary approval for recertification of our B Corp status with an expected score of 95.4%. a 15% improvement over our initial certification in 2019. I'm proud that we're at the forefront to move agriculture to a more sustainable future with strong ESG principles as our foundation. As a sign of our continued commitment and strong track record in this area, we will also release our third sustainability report in the coming weeks. I will now ask our president, David Lee, to share more details on our Q1 results. David.