Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Deveron Corp Q1 Results Conference Call. At this time, all lines are in listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. This call is being recorded on November 22nd, 2023. I would now like to turn the conference over to Philip Linton. Please go ahead. Thank you, operator. As we conduct this call, various statements that we make about future expectations, plans, and prospects are in forward-looking information. Certain material assumptions were applied in making these conclusions and forecasts. Therefore, actual results could differ materially from those contained in our forward-looking information. Additional information about these factors and assumptions are contained in our current quarterly report to shareholders, as well as our most recent annual report, MD&A, and annual information form filed with the Canadian Securities Commission. Joining us today are Mr. David MacMillan, President and CEO, and Mr. Akshay Shirodker, CFO. I will now turn the call over to David MacMillan for opening comments before we take your questions. David? Good morning, and thank you everyone for joining us this morning on Deveron's fiscal Q1 earnings call. Before we begin discussing Deveron's results and the company's outlook for the rest of the fiscal year, I want to detail some of the challenges and opportunities Deveron has experienced in the market. As our field teams execute post-harvest, helping our customers make their input decisions for the following year, we are seeing record fertility numbers come through our lab network, which continues to speak to the value of the growing platform. We're processing more than 10,000 samples a day. Deveron's fertility business continued to perform, with its sample volume growing 21% year-over-year. This is a unique opportunity to capitalize on the operational leverage within the lab assets and adding incremental margin. There continues to be a substantial growth opportunity within our current and trusted customer base, specifically in the U.S., where testing services are fragmented and lack the technological standardization. The agriculture industry continues to expand, with farm needs, social and economic factors driving new users to our data. With respect to carbon, we've been very early to the market, signing some extremely large customers. We built infrastructure to collect and test, and the volume has not met our expectations in the quarter. We believe over time, this will be a growing segment of Deveron, but for now allows us to focus on fertility and other ancillary services. Additionally, it allows us to focus on streamlining our U.S. collection network and lab operations to improve profitability. We're looking forward to providing a more specific measurement to this improvement in operating costs as we work through the remainder of the year. Another note on cost management and optimization is our continued integration of our Canadian and U.S. lab network. We are now utilizing technology and process from our Canadian lab network, which we expect will create CAD 900,000 in run rate savings, effective December 1st, 2023. Turning to our results, we were able to deliver quarterly revenue of CAD 7.7 million, which was a 7% increase year-over-year. Gross margins were up at 65%, improving 5%. This was supported by the execution of cost synergies through our acquisition strategy, strong fertility growth, and operational leverage within the lab asset. As our business evolves, we think this positive volume trends in fertility are strong indicators of the underlying value our customers see in our business. Agriculture is extremely regionally organized industry. Deveron has a unique advantage of first-mile field service that can help accelerate soil testing for our customers. By removing the labor constraint, we are seeing our customers test more and interact within our platform. As we free up some resources and reallocate more focus to fertility testing, we feel confident in our ability to deliver continued and growing value to our customer base. As we continue into the rest of the fiscal year, we've started to build the foundation of a valuable business that provides incredible, independent, and mission-critical information to the North American farm community. Agriculture soil testing offers significant returns to the users of this information. This value is evidenced in the growing density of testing, in conjunction with a growing appetite for more information outside of the historical and basic testing parameters of N, P, and K. While our testing services are not limited to fertility, we believe it offers the best place to focus and can help our teams prioritize the expansion of fertility testing with new customers and upselling current customers into more valuable offerings. With that, I'd like to hand it over to our CFO, Akshay, to speak more directly to our results. Go ahead. Thank you, David. Hello, everyone, and thanks for taking the time to join us on today's call. As you can see from our results, we continue to grow sales and improve on our margins. I think we have started to work on a few other realization of synergies that will continue to provide improvement in our results over the coming quarters. In reviewing our results, Deveron was able to achieve growth despite headwinds in our ancillary carbon business. In fiscal Q1, the company achieved 7% growth in top-line revenue, up from CAD 7.1 million to CAD 7.7 million year-over-year. Data collection revenue grew 62% to CAD 1.2 million, thanks to growing demand for field services. Data insights revenue increased to CAD 6.5 million from CAD 6.4 million. This slowdown in growth was due to dampened volumes in the carbon business as adoption of carbon programs slowed in the market. Also, we are still seeing some headwinds in our tissue testing programs in Canada, but it does look like volumes have started to rebound, so we are cautiously optimistic here. This quarter was also highlighted by improvements in gross margin percentage and improvements in the company's EBITDA profile. The key driver to this improvement was increased demand for the company's fertility products, driving improved margin profile. Gross margin percentage increased 5% year-over-year to 65% for the quarter, while EBITDA margin percentage increased 11% year-over-year for the similar period. We as a company have a very exciting opportunity ahead as we reset focus around fertility and focus more on this upsell to our current customers. Once we reach scale, testing volume becomes a driver to the bottom line, which is why we are focusing on this in the coming months. Dave will be discussing the cost optimization opportunities we've implemented, but over the last two months, in my review of the business, we've identified other opportunities to manage costs, specifically around field services. You can see an increase in quarterly operating expenses as we have onboarded full-time staff to service volume. In the other regions of our service network, there is a more flexible model, leveraging third-party collection staff, which can be tied more directly to revenue. I'll be working with our teams over the coming quarters to assess market demand and manage margin more closely in real time. With continued focus on prioritization to the team, we can continue to grow while delivering better cost management. We started to realize some synergies across standardization of technology and process across our lab network, but we are just scratching the surface. I'm looking forward to working through our busy season with our team and pushing a renewed focus on volume as a key operating metric for the company. With that brief overview, I'll hand it back over to Dave for closing remarks. Thanks, Akshay. We see a great opportunity to concentrate on our growing fertility business and leverage our vertically integrated lab and soil collection networks. Historically, our strongest sales numbers come following the harvest in Q2, which should continue to illustrate the value of the network we are in the very early innings of building. Soil is one of the most important data layers in the agriculture industry. The provision of field collection and testing is fragmented and lacks standardization, which we believe gives Deveron a unique position to grow from. With a continued focus and evaluation of the drivers of our business in the quarters ahead, we believe our mission of becoming the world's soil bank creates significant value for our customers. With that, Gale, let's open the call for questions. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Should you have a question, please press star followed by the one on your touchtone phone. You will hear a three-tone prompt acknowledging your request, and your questions will be pulled in the order they are received. Should you wish to decline from the polling process, please press star followed by the two. If you are using a speakerphone, please lift the handset before pressing any keys. Your first question comes from Steve Hansen with Raymond James. Please go ahead. Yeah, good morning, guys. Thanks for the time. Dave, just on the carbon side, it sounds like it's gone soft as you've described. How flexible is your cost structure on that side as well? It, it sounds like it's related to the field services you've spoken to, but, you know, maybe just describe the magnitude of the headwind and how quickly you think you can adjust to, that soft as you've described it. Yeah. Thanks, Steve. Maybe I'll address a bit of the market, and then I think Akshay can also talk a little bit to the flexibility of the cost structure. So what we're seeing in carbon, obviously, we were one of the first companies, especially in the U.S., to be out there, working with some of the largest global companies in their sustainability programs and carbon testing. I think what we've started to see come through the pipeline, from a science side, that's creating some headwinds, is that MRV protocols are not completely standardized yet. So I think large companies are struggling with determining what their SOP should be. And as they firm up those protocol measurements, we're starting to see a differentiation on, like, how much physical soil is needed to verify those credits. So that's creating a little bit of a headwind from the standpoint of, how, like, how much base level. You know, someone was saying, "Well, we need 20,000 points previously." I think the science now is suggesting that with good practices, they can half that number. So I think that's one thing that's creating a bit of a headwind. I think the other, which is probably more real in terms of, I think, long term, is just grower demand is still struggling a little bit. I think what we're hearing from all our partners is, companies are full bore on the importance of sustainability and creating these carbon programs, whether as loyalty rewards for their customers or real ESG offsets within their businesses. The issue is that the grower still doesn't quite know what the direct value is to them. Obviously, there's been a lot of flexibility in how carbon credits have been priced, and depending on the program the growers are participating in, I think there are still some unknowns in what they're signing up for, whether it be 100-year leases and how do you transfer land values. So I think those are two things that, at the end of the day, are gonna get sorted out, and as programs scale, it really—it's kind of helpful to us if we can be taking less samples per farm because it means more customers can participate. And at the end of the day, all of those samples can start flowing through our laboratory ecosystem. But that's been a driver on one side. And I think as we start to see, you know, government participate a little bit more in standardization, and growers having a little bit more visibility into the actual value that they're getting out of participating in these programs, we'll see a ramp up again. But I think those are two things that just over the next couple of quarters, the industry needs to solve, and as they, you know, work through it, that's gonna help us. With respect to the flexibility of our operating costs, I think this is some of the things that Akshay has been working very deeply with on our side since he started. And Akshay, maybe I'll hand it over to you just to give, Steve and everyone a better overview of where you see some of the flexibility moving forward. Yeah. So with regards to servicing the carbon business in general, you've got a bucket of costs on the lab side and on the field services side. And on the lab side, it's extremely flexible. We haven't made any significant capital expenditures to service the business, as we're using existing lab equipment, and the biggest driver for cost being lab technicians that can be scaled up or down as a business group. But on the field services side, that's where we have real cost synergies here. And highlighting what we had mentioned before, which we had a full-time collective staff in anticipation of growing volume in the carbon business, we can significantly reduce our overhead and reduce the number of full-time staff that we have to service the carbon business and start switching over to a third-party service contractor, seasonal type model. That's where I think the real flexibility is. And in terms of timing, at the end of the season, we can move away and restructure our costs, and that's, you know, the November, December timeframe. So pretty quickly, and we have a lot of flexibility in terms of aligning costs with revenue. Okay, that's great. That's very helpful. And if you guys are thinking about, the margin profile on the lab business or the insights business looks pretty fantastic. But I'm just—I'm trying to get a sense for sort of the balance of the year. You're in their busiest season now. It sounds like that cost challenge will linger into the Q4 a little bit on the field services side, and then as we get into next year, it'll improve. Is Is that the way to think about it, the next calendar year, sorry, that is? Yeah, sorry. If you're talking about this quarter, yes, the costs will linger on, you know, 2/3 of the remaining quarter, so up until the start of December. And starting January 1st, yes, there will be a reset in terms of how we deliver this revenue across both lab testing and field services. Your next question comes from Nick Boychuk with Cormark. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Thank you. Thanks. Coming back to the carbon angle, Dave, or actually, can you guys expand a little bit on how much growth you're expecting from that business into 2024, relative to what you're going to be able to recruit for the fertility side of the business? Yeah, I think what we've done is, as we've seen volumes be a little light through this quarter, we've gone back to our partners and said, "Okay, where are you guys at in your selling cycle with respect to these programs heading into next year?" And the way it sort of works, so everything in agriculture, which is sometimes seasonally frustrating, is when folks are doing a ton of work in the field, there's not much selling that's happening. So we really have to kinda get through the tail end of the season, so, you know, two or three more weeks before we can kinda sit down with all the groups and say, "Okay, how are we thinking about demand, given, A, the fact that MRV protocols are sort of constantly changing, and B, the sign-ups that you're forecasting moving ahead?" I do think that there is still quite a bit of opportunity in how we've initially, I think, won business in this market. And as we mature as a company, can go forward and negotiate, I think, pricing, you know, tied to volume discount, and kind of play a more partnership angle, where, again, as the business grows, there can be volume reductions. It will give us more flexibility, I think, in the way we plan for things versus, you know, you can imagine in the very beginning of carbon, where it was quite a wild west, people were rolling out maps of all the United States and saying, "You know, we're gonna have credits to sell left, right, and center." And although I think everybody believes that will be the case, it's just taking a little bit more time, again, to ramp up and to get, I think, grower sign-ups. We've been going everywhere we can. We've had, you know, teams going as far as Montana, working in the mountains, from pastureland to corn in Iowa. It's just I think everybody needs to reset a little bit with respect to where the network can focus, and we're having those conversations with our partners. So probably by maybe the end of the year, can give you a little bit more, I think, direct expectation on how to think about carbon. But we're still gonna have to sit down with our groups and, as Akshay mentioned, kind of go through what next year looks like, given demand being driven by the underlying programs. If that answers your question. Yeah. And also just a quick follow-up on the balance sheet. Can you kind of comment how comfortable you are with the current cash balance? Just speak to the debt profile, and how you plan on managing that into the back end of the half of the year. Sure. Akshay, maybe I can hand that one over to you. Yeah. So we feel very confident that we have enough to operate through this busy season and build up a cash surplus as we exit this season. With our planned refocus and alignment with revenue, we feel as if we can extend that cash surplus into the coming year at least midway through calendar year 2024, or covering all of Q4 2024. Yeah, and I think just to add to that, Nick, like, obviously, where our balance sheet is, we've—it's a little bit complicated from a standpoint of, you know, where debt lives. Like, we've got debt living at a secondary entity, which we're the majority shareholder of, and then we have convertible notes at the public company. We feel like we've got great sponsorship with our lending partners. Our underlying businesses where the debt sits, and we have covenants is all performing and, we're on side with everything. So from a standpoint of moving into next year, it's really about continuing to optimize costs and realign to an operating model tied to volume. You know, over the last three years, we've built a pretty robust entity that's been focused on acquiring, you know, over 10 companies. We're now doing the hard work of integrating everything in and getting everyone to one metric, which we think is tied to volume. We think being able to communicate that externally is gonna help with everybody and how they think about the business. And to Akshay's point, tie margin a lot more closely to revenue profile. And I think over the coming quarters, you're going to see a lot more emphasis from us on that cost optimization side. We obviously announced an additional CAD 900,000 in savings from technology process that's real right to the bottom line, which will be effective as of December 1st on a run rate basis. So there's, there's lots of opportunities here. Again, we feel a little bit sideswiped by what's happened in the macro carbon business, but, you know, the bet that we made, that this market's gonna be really important for us, which we still believe, it's just gonna take a couple quarters to sort out. And moving forward, we're pretty excited about the opportunity to focus around fertility, and service, again, this very large North American market. Thanks. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines.