AppHarvest, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the App Harvest third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to Travis Parman, Chief Communications Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you for joining us on the App Harvest third quarter 2022 earnings call. I'm Travis Parman, Chief Communications Officer for App Harvest. Joining me today are several members of the senior management team, including Jonathan Webb, founder and CEO, Lauren Eggleton, Chief Financial Officer, and David Lee, President and Board Member. The earnings release is 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. As I believe all of you understand, historically, the third quarter is a low revenue period for us based on our annual refresh and replanting of our Moorhead farm to prepare for the next growing season. That is the case again this year. and our focus has been to take lessons learned and to apply them to what we hope to be a robust growing season that has already started. The domestic need for CEA continues to grow. We believe that the U.S. remains significantly underbuilt. It's estimated that the U.S. has about 6,000 acres of CEA compared to Europe at nearly 520,000 acres. According to USDA reports, the value of U.S. fruit and vegetable imports rose to a record level in 2021 and has been projected to keep increasing in 2022. Changing weather patterns ranging from mega drought in the southwest of the U.S. to more frequent flooding to catastrophic wind events are making it harder than ever for open field farmers to predict the duration of their growing seasons and to have conditions that result in quality harvest. Major food retailers have demonstrated increasing interest in high-tech indoor farms for their ability to de-risk fruit and vegetable production with a more climate resilient, more sustainable year-round growing solution that uses far fewer resources. And we continue to have top national grocery stores visit our new farms. 165 acres, nearly 8 million square feet, That will be the size of our four-farm network once completed. We believe that's the largest simultaneous CEA build-out in the U.S. I'm proud that the App Harvest team has set new standards for developing such at-scale CEA infrastructure by working to quadruple our number of farms by the end of this year. These farms, once completed, will diversify our crops by adding a variety such as salad greens, berries, cucumbers, as well as more tomatoes. On October 26, we announced the start of commercial shipments from our new 15-acre Berea Salad Greens Farm. This farm features a touchless growing system with autonomous harvesting. We're in the process of opening Berea on a phased approach, beginning with five acres. We're working to bring on additional productive acreage this year. At capacity, App Harvest Berea will have about 35 million lettuce plants growing at a time, which is expected to be able to harvest the equivalent of an estimated 10 miles of lettuce per day. Salad greens from App Harvest Berea will be used in the new Queen of Greens washed and ready-to-eat package salad brand. In last week, we announced the opening of our 30-acre Somerset Berry Farm. The team planted nearly 1 million strawberry plants for this season, and we already have started commercial shipments of wild berries for our customer, Mastinardi Produce. In addition to strawberries, we expect to alternate the crop seasonally with English cucumbers. Construction continues on our 60-acre Richmond farm, which we expect will allow us to double our capacity to grow tomatoes when completed. Combined with the Morehead Farm, the Richmond facility is expected to enable us to grow nearly 1.5 million tomato plants per season. We expect to plant the first half of the Richmond Farm this November. We also have been making good progress on securing non-dilutive financing to support our expansion, including the recently announced $50 million USDA-backed loans and a $30 million loan for Mastronardi Produce, $15 million of which has been funded and $15 million of which remains to be funded. We continue to evaluate financing alternatives, including a potential sale lease back of our Berea Salad Greens farm to Master Energy Produce to fund further development and growth. Lorne will share more details on our strategy later. Regarding our flagship farm in Moorhead, our team has taken lessons learned and applied them to what we expect to be a good growing season. Planting for the third growing season at Moorhead is complete and harvesting is expected to begin in early November. The crop is healthy and shows none of the plant health issues that we have previously encountered. The team continues to make progress in improving quality, reducing our distribution fee, and selling in higher-priced varietals. This quarter, we've continued to focus on operational execution to maximize quality and yield of our produce for the upcoming season. We expect to keep benefiting from enhanced training and productivity improvements put in place. The team has also made progress with robust recruitment efforts to staff our three new farms. Demand for locally sourced produce has continued to increase, and the recent headlines regarding water use restrictions and food insecurity caused by geopolitical instability should only serve to add to that interest. I will now ask our Chief Financial Officer, Lauren Eggleton, to share more details on our performance in the third quarter. Lauren? Thanks Jonathan.