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spk00: Good morning and welcome to the Farmers Edge live audio webcast for its first quarter 2022 financial results and business highlights. Please be advised that reproduction of this audio webcast in whole or in part is not permitted without written authorization from the company. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. And after the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star and the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press the pound key. Individuals will be limited to two questions per person before being put back into the queue. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Cindy Yuan, Chief Financial Officer of Farmers Edge. Please go ahead, Ms. Yuan.
spk01: Cindy Yuan Thank you all, Peter, and good morning, everyone. Before we start, we would like to remind you that all amounts disclosed on this call are denominated in Canadian dollars, unless otherwise indicated. Please note that prepared remarks contain forward-looking information, and additional forward-looking statements may be made in response to your questions during the Q&A portion of the call. This statement reflects companies' current expectations regarding future events. Forward-looking information is based on a number of assumptions and is subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond company control or could cause actual results and events to differ materially from those that are disclosed in or implied by such forward-looking information. Visionaries are urged to consider assumptions, risks, and uncertainties associated with such forward-looking information, including by referring to the assumptions, risks, and uncertainties discussed in the pharmaceuticals with Canadian securities administrators. These statements do not guarantee future performance, and therefore undue reliance should not be placed upon them. The company does not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking information provided during these audio webcasts, whether as a result of new information, future events, Otherwise, these setbacks may be required under applicable security flaws. Finally, we would like to remind listeners that the company may refer to certain non-GAAP measures and key performance indicators, or KPIs, during the audio webcast for further details on non-GAAP measures and KPIs, including relevant definitions and certain reconciliations. See Farmer's Edge findings with Canadian security administrators. We would also refer you to our Q1 MDAA and financial statement filed last week. I now turn the call over to our chairman, Bill McFarland, for opening remarks.
spk05: Thanks, Cindy. Q1 2022 had, as expected, a small year-over-year revenue increase after adjusting channel partner subsidies in Q1 2021. We felt the impact of several items, a lower conversion rate on the Elite 2020 program, the 2021 strategic acre discontinuance initiatives and mature acre retention, along with lower fertility revenue in Q1 2022 of about a million dollars compared to Q1 2021. This was expected as a greater percentage of the fertility seasonal work was completed in Q4 2021. The adjusted pre-cash flow deficiency was consistent with prior quarters and steps have been initiated to reduce the cash burn which the team will speak to. The impact of these actions will start to be realized in the back portion of the year. The Fairfax loan commitment for $75 million also recently closed and will provide the necessary time to make progress. A key goal over the past couple of months has been to hire a new CEO. The board was pleased to announce earlier today that Vivor Aurora, will become the new CEO and will start June 6th. He is a seasoned executive from Amazon that is looking forward to the opportunity at Farmer's Edge and has strong leadership, operational, strategic, and project management experience, and was responsible for building the robotic fulfillment organization in Canada for Amazon. Bibor will be available to respond to various market participants following his June 6th start date. I'll now pass things over to Wade for some more details on the Q1 results.
spk07: Thanks, Bill. Well, let me start with that we strengthened our management team this past quarter. We've added Rob Meyer, who will focus on corporate development and strategy and lead our carbon group. We've also added Matt Hess, our EVP of operations. Matt has a strong background in ag tech with expertise with Trimble and FieldReveal. Matt also has a very strong knowledge of the U.S. retail space from his time with Winfield United. We have also added Jamie Orr, who is now leading our commodity ag team. Jamie has a long history of management in the U.S. retail with Nutrien and will be critical in the development of our pipeline of acres with our commodity ag partners. We've had a very successful start to our convergence of the 2021 PGP grower campaigns. The company achieved 63% conversion on all contracts which were due April 1, with over 90% of these contracts being upsold to higher value fertility products alongside a carbon agreement. Last year, we were only at 19% conversion, with the majority of those contracts converting to a lower value smart solution. This uptick in conversions will start to increase revenues in the next quarter with the biggest impact coming in quarter four. We've also made strong progress with early conversions for October, with 30% of our October PGP already converted into our fertility program. If you were to compare this to last year, we had almost no early conversions at this time. These conversions will make a revenue impact in quarter four. In the first quarter, we've had 185,000 acres of mature customers coming due for contract renewal. We've retained 167,000 acres of these contracts, which is running close to 90% retention. I believe this is a great start on retention of mature customers. We have 1.3 million acres, which is coming due this fall, and we want to carry this progress on retention into the fall. It is very encouraging to see these changes that we've implemented with our sales and customer success team starting to make a big impact both on conversions and mature retention. We've also added 1.6 million new acres both of paid and progressive grower here in the first quarter. This is trending a little less than last year, but the teams are very focused on customer selection, and we believe these acres are the highest quality, and we have high expectations that many of them will convert this fall to our fertility program. April sales closed at about 337,000 acres, which is on target, and we believe we are on pace to exceed last year's sales numbers. We are very focused not only on converted last year's PGP acres to high-value fertility acres, but also focused on moving the 2022 PG acres into a fertility conversion, which will make a revenue impact in the fourth quarter. The Smart Carbon Program continues to gain momentum. We have added another 500,000 unique acres to our program on which the teams will start the offset creation process later this fall. We are working to have offsets processed and serialized and sold from last year's season primarily in the back half of this year, which we expect will result in approximately $13 million in revenue. This will be a mixture of conservation tillage and nitrous oxide reduction offsets. We have made our first offset sales to Maple Leaf Foods and have strong interest from buyers once they are serialized and ready for sale. We believe that many of these acres that we sign up in North America will have a carbon contract going forward, which will help with conversions to higher value fertility solutions. We are also refining our platform to increase the efficiencies of the offset development and serialization, and to build a foundation for the ability to sell insets to food companies and renewable markets. The inset market will require the ability to track and create low carbon intensity scores, which Farmer's Edge plans to provide to all our farm clients this fall. We believe the inset market is going to play a major role in agriculture and Farmer's Edge will be positioned to help our farmer customers and our commercial partners take advantage of this market in the future. We've rolled out our heat blast product this spring and have indicative quotes with 550 farms to close on 1.5 million acres of canola. The planting season was late so far, so many of these growers have not finalized the insurance because they have not started to plant their crops. They have five days after they're finished planning to buy new insurance screaming. There has been significant interest in this product and we are excited to continue to build our new digital products with our reinsurance partners in the future. We also launched a yield product this year in the pilot phase. We had very strong interest and sold over 200,000 acres. We plan to expand this product next year with our reinsurance partners once it's proven. We continue to grow our insurance opportunity in Brazil with our smart reporting product, which is a tool to support claims, acre reporting, and yield prediction. We've had strong success with Fairfax Brazil last year, and we ran a pilot with three other major insurance companies in Brazil. We plan to roll out that program for the soybean season with multiple different insurance providers. We continue to develop and integrate the Commodit Ag e-commerce platform. We have new leadership. Jamie Orr and Matt Hess, with their experience and relationships in the US retail space, we believe will accelerate our engagement with our retail partners and drive new e-commerce and acre sign-ups. Supply chain issues have impacted us like the rest of the industry, but it has also created an opportunity as farmers look for new suppliers when product is short. We've seen solid sales given disruption, specifically on crop protection, and we believe this will continue as we enter the planting and spraying season in Q2. We've streamlined the operations with the integration to the broader Farmer's Edge team, and we are now utilizing our account managers to get our customer base exposure to the CommodAg platform, which we believe will drive sales even further. The integration has reduced costs, created a more focused approach. We continue to add new retail partners, and we are working with new and existing partners to develop a strong acre pipeline for this fall for our smart fertility and carbon programs. We believe that the e-commerce market in agriculture will continue to grow, and the distribution and logistic partnerships with our retail partners provide Farmer's Edge a very unique opportunity in the marketplace. Cindy, over to you for the financial results.
spk01: Thank you, Wade. My comments will primarily focus on the first quarter results for current year 2022. In quarter one of 2022, annual recurring revenue, ARR, was $69.5 million, slightly lower than year in 2021. ARR was a positive impact by our solid growth of 1.6 million new acres, offset by PGP 21 acres not converted. It was also impacted by our changing strategy to no longer support low-value, image-only acres in the Brazilian market, as there was no pathway to up-sell these acres in the future. The closure of our Russian and Ukraine operations due to the war, and a reduction of other acres due to extreme weather conditions in Brazil in 2021, resulting in a challenging crop insurance market in the first half of 2022. On a combined basis, digital agronomy acre was lower by 650,000 to 15.9 million acres from the year end, but with a higher quality or better needs of acres as AR value per acre had improved to $3.68 per acre in Q1 2022 from $3.51 per acre at year end 2021, reflecting the positive impact of our strategy change as described above. ARR also excluded revenue from commodity ag e-commerce business and sales insurance products, which we believe will continue to be a growing portion of our business. Revenue in the first quarter was $8.6 million after excluding non-recruiting China partners subsidy of $1.5 million was up slightly from prior year. Digital agronomy and fertility solution revenue was $5.7 million. Excluding China partner subsidy, revenue declined $1.7 million, primarily due to the high soil testing completion rate in Q4 2021, which reduced Q1 revenue by $1 million on a comparable basis. Lower paid acre basis on the change in strategy discussed early, including discontinuance of the acres in 2021 and Q1 2022. The PGP 21 acre converted will start generating revenue in Q2 this year. but the largest impact will be in Q4 from the fertility product sales. Business and electrical revenue in Q1 was $200,000, a decrease of $600,000 on a year-to-year basis, primarily due to no carbon offset sale in Q1 2022. In Q1 last year, we had 500,000 carbon offset sales. Crop in e-commerce sales was $2.5 million in Q1, grew by $1.5 million from Q4 2021. reflecting the typically stronger spring season sales. The growth margin was strong. However, volume are being impacted by the supply chain issues. Our operating expenses increased to $28.1 million, approximately $10 million higher on a year-to-year basis, including the following. $2.2 million of cost would be sold for e-commerce crop input sales related to the commodity acquisition in August 2021. higher people and vehicle costs, and employees began working under reduced call-way restriction in a high inflation environment. 900,000 one-time cloud hosting transition costs and increased satellite imaging costs. 2.8 million increase in selling and marketing expenses, primarily reflecting the change made in Q4 21 to the sales team and the structure to improve the customer retention and the conversions. And the general admin expenses increases also include our investment in people to accelerate the carbon and insurance business of $1 million, and a non-cash stock-based composition related to the long-term incentive plan implemented at the time of the IPO. This high expense was the primary reason for the adjusted EBITDA loss in Q1 2022. The adjusted free cash flow deficit in Q1 was consistent on a year-on-year basis, and also had a benefit of a $5.3 million reduction in trade receivables. Management is reviewing the overall cost structure to find opportunities to gain operational efficiency and effectiveness through cost containment efforts. Action has been taken to address the fixed cost portion of business, and this effort will continue in the coming quarters. Up to date, management has identified approximately $8 million for annual cost saving opportunities to help reduce the cash burn rate. I will now pass it over to Wade for some final comments.
spk07: Thank you, Cindy. My final comment is just as we go forward, we believe that on the quarters going forward, we'll have a revenue uptick. Our insurance commissions will go right to the bottom line in quarter two. We're seeing really strong acre growth in Brazil, and I want to remind everybody that the Brazilian acres are all paid-for acres. Our carbon opportunity will continue to expand in North America and other markets, and also with a significant opportunity in the inset space. Our higher value fertility solutions in Q4 will grow, and carbon will be the main driver behind this. With that, I'm opening up the lines to questions for us. And including in the room is Anita Wurtsman, the company's president. I'll pass back to the operator. Thank you.
spk00: Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To join the question queue, you may press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. You will hear a tone acknowledging your request. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing any keys. To redraw your question, please press star, then two. We will pause for a moment as callers join the queue. The first question is from Richard Che with National Bank Financial. Please go ahead.
spk02: Yes, thank you, and good morning. Just wondering if you could maybe just quickly walk through again with us the go-to-market strategy for the smart carbon product.
spk07: Sure. Good morning, Richard. The strategy right now is both in Canada and the U.S. is to essentially get on the farm with our smart solution and then essentially bring the customer into the fertility program utilizing carbon. We have a protocol developed on the Canadian side. There's an existing protocol that we're working on in the US that enables us to get a carbon offset when a farmer utilizes our platform on nitrogen reduction. We also, in Canada, have a carbon program in place when it comes to conservation tillage. So when a farmer utilizes no-till, and we collect the data, we can also create a carbon offset. So in Canada, both nitrogen and no-till is what's used. In the U.S., we have an ability to use no-till as well, but the main focus will be around management of nitrogen.
spk02: Okay. Thank you. And then my second question is, you know, no doubt there's sort of inflation across the board, and you mentioned it in your comments as well. In terms of the farmers and your people out there pitching deals, how has that impacted the nature of discussions and also the appetite for farmers to come on to any or all of your programs here?
spk07: Great question. What we're seeing is obviously costs go up at a farm level. We have record costs in fertilizer and other crop inputs. We also have record commodity prices. So the farmer now has a significant amount of risk on the farm. I think the Farmer's Edge platform is actually a perfect fit for the grower right now. One, it helps him manage his costs, specifically around fertility. So with that, the growers can utilize the platform, be very focused on managing their costs. most likely will help them create a carbon offset and maybe create new opportunities in marketing. And there's also a significant force that's coming from government around the reduction of nitrogen when it comes to greenhouse gases, which I think will also help impact farmers' edges' need at a farm level.
spk04: Okay, great. Thank you.
spk00: The next question is from Steve Hansen with Raymond James. Please go ahead.
spk04: Yeah, good morning, guys. Wade, could you maybe just elaborate a little bit more on the inset opportunity and how you see that evolving over time? Recognize what an inset is, but I'm trying to understand how you're targeting the customer base there relative to what you might be doing in the offset market. Thanks.
spk07: Yeah, so thanks, Steve. So as we know that with Scope 3 emissions that both food companies and renewable companies have to map out their emissions in the supply chain and 40% of the emissions that are connected to a renewable or to a food company is connected to the grain they buy at a farm level. So they have to actually measure all the energy use at a farm. And one of the key elements of energy use in a farm is fertilizer use, fuel use, and propane that's used to condition the grain. So Farmer's Edge, our platform is set up perfectly to monitor and record the amount of energy that's used. Today, we essentially use that platform to create an offset that's based on a protocol But as you go into the future, an ethanol plant, for an example, will need to buy corn from a farmer that has a low carbon intensity score because it will enable them to be able to create ethanol with a lower emission mandate. So we see this as an emerging trend that we're quickly going to most likely move from offset focus into an inset focus. And the ability of being able to track the energy use on the farm field by field is going to be critical. And again, I think we're positioned very well to take advantage of this.
spk04: And just to clarify then, so those insets then, would you be targeting the sale of those insets, I should say, will be targeted towards the larger enterprises then who value across the energy consumption, across the value chain, and then you're just leveraging existing data you would already have? Or do those inset credits get credited to the farmer as well?
spk07: Well, in discussions with some of the renewable and food companies, how they'll see it is that they'll need a qualified inset. So the process that we create an offset will be very similar to how we create the inset. that data will need to be transferred on to the buyer, the renewable or the food company. They will compensate the farmer for this by way of a premium, and that's being talked about with all of the food companies and the renewables. That premium will probably be dictated based on what the cost of an offset is, but based on the discussions we have, that it sounds like an inset will carry probably three to four times more value than what a typical offset will have. So the main focus from a food company or renewable, they're going to need scale. They're going to need to be able to implement this with all of their customers because they can't take away from the efficiencies of buying grain and moving it into their processing facilities.
spk04: Oh, that makes sense. Okay, that's helpful. And then just, if I may, on the insurance side, you indicated good uptake on the heat blast product from an acreage standpoint, recognizing, of course, that the plant is delayed. Do you get a sense for what kind of conversion you can get on those acres from an indication standpoint in terms of actually closing the sale? I'm just trying to get a sense for how that conversion might look when it comes to a revenue opportunity.
spk07: I mean, from the field, we're hearing real positive news. And look, as the planting season gets delayed, the risk around heat blocking is really on the farmer's mind, specifically when it comes to canola. Right now, this is prime canola planting season, and most of Manitoba and eastern Saskatchewan have not planted. The canola growing region of North Dakota hasn't planted, so... you know, farmers will start to get concerned about that. So we think that our hit rate will most likely go up. So I can't really give you an exact number right now. All I can tell you is that there's really strong interest from the field. And, you know, whether it be Farmer's Edge reaching out and talking to the customers or customers who are hearing about the heat loss or reaching out to us,
spk04: Okay, helpful. And just I was taken a bit by the 90% retention rate that you mentioned earlier that you've had, I think, thus far up into April. What do you think it is that's really driving that higher retention rate on your existing acres? I think you referenced the sales team and customer success teams, but is there anything specific there that's helping drive that?
spk07: Well, look, we made a real strategic change in our direction with how we operate our I would say last fall. At the beginning of 21, we tried to run a very typical fast model where sales would go out and sell and then customer support would essentially try to convert those customers. We saw some issues with that when it comes to the handoff and with customer selection. and ensuring that the people we sign up on are progressive grower, that we have a really high potential of converting them. What we realized is that it was better to essentially have the salesperson who sells the customer have that responsibility to bring them across to a conversion. So we merged those two teams together, and I think now we're starting to see sort of the fruit of that, Now we've always had a very strong retention rate when it comes to mature business. And this is a small sample size here, April 1, but it looks really positive going into the fall retention season. But you can also see from our strong conversion in the first quarter at 63%, that I think that that strategic move is starting to pay dividends, not only for just the conversion, but the conversion into higher value products. So we're really happy about that. A big part of our challenges last year was around the weakness of the conversion from quarter one and then chasing it through the season all the way to the end of the year. And we really feel that we're not going to have that problem this year, that those early indications conversions are strong. The carbon program is helping for sure. But our goal is to get those farmers to commit early, commit to the higher value product, so that we can drive that revenue number up for the third and fourth quarters.
spk04: Okay, very good. Thank you.
spk00: Once again, if you have a question, please press star, then one. The next question is from Nick Boychok with Cormart Securities. Please go ahead.
spk03: Thanks, good morning. On the conversion of PGP program acres in April, Wade, can you expand on the 63% conversion rate of the acres that didn't convert? Could they still? Did you extend free trials? What are you thinking happens with those acres?
spk07: Yeah, so we've made a conscious effort that we want a decision from the grower one way or the other because if a grower chooses not to convert, we want to redeploy that equipment as quickly as we can. to save on our CapEx. We had a few customers that we essentially pushed off to October 1 just based on some glitches with some service or some issues that the customer was actually pretty positive but maybe didn't get exactly the experience we wanted. So there's been a few that's been pushed to October that we feel really confident about. But, I mean, I think last year that was some of our issue is that when we had, you know, when we connected our carbon program to the conversion, we pushed it out and we lost revenue for those months. And then essentially at the end of the year made those farmers make a decision. And we just want to have that decision happen earlier in the season. I think you guys want that as well to give you better transparency of how we're tracking quarter by quarter rather than sort of kicking the can down the road.
spk03: Yeah, absolutely. I think it would clarify the acreage count for us understanding how many are higher value. So it's still a follow-up of the roughly 17 million acres that you have operating. If you had to estimate how many would still be at a low value, the Brazilian imagery acres, something in Russia, Ukraine, Roughly, what's the number or percentage of high value fertility acres within that $17 million?
spk07: Yeah, well, good question. So after this quarter, we continue to be laser focused on moving those, I would call them non-platform acres out. Our focus is increasing our revenue per acre up. It enables us to track things better and know what's real. The acres that we currently have in the system, we would consider a platform of high-value acres moving forward. It's absolutely critical for the organization to have that connected acre. That's how we're essentially going to build off of when it comes to carbon offsets and insets and insurance going forward. So right now, the acres that we're carrying, we would consider of all higher value. So platform acres and up, the majority of them are smart and smart fertility.
spk03: Perfect. Thanks. And then just coming to the cost, obviously sales and marketing costs are pretty significant year over year, as is GMA. And as we think about that relative to the $8 million that you guys think you'll be able to strip out of the business, Very roughly, what do you think the run rate expense level is going forward?
spk06: Sorry, can you just repeat the last sentence? I kind of missed it.
spk03: Yeah, no, I was just asking going forward what the rough kind of op-ex is for the business from a sales and marketing and G&A, just given the year-over-year increase as you built up the sales team, but also the commentary that you think you could potentially strip out up to $8 million of fixed costs from the business.
spk01: Hi, Nick. Good morning. This is Cindy here. From a cost reduction perspective, we do not expect a significant reduction in Q2. So, rather similar level as Q1. You know, in Q2, we have carbon sales as cost of goods sold about 17% at the general repairable to farmers. However, we do expect strong second half in terms of revenue. Our cost reduction effort will have bigger impact in the second half. So you would see a gradual step down in the GNA in overall cost as we continue on working on the cost-containment efforts.
spk03: Okay, perfect. That makes sense. Thank you. And then the last for me, there's a line in the MD&A that mentions that a million dollars of the decrease in digital ag and fertility solutions revenue was due to higher soil testing complete rates for fertility in Q4-21 compared to the prior year. Can you just expand on what that means?
spk07: Yeah, so essentially we got more soil testing done in 2021, you know, in that kind of November-December timeline compared to the year before. So more revenue went into 21 compared to last year. So less soil testing happened in January of this year.
spk03: Perfect. That makes so much sense. Thanks, Whit.
spk00: This concludes the question and answer session and today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating and have a pleasant day.
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