All right. I think we'll get started. It is with great pleasure that not two, but two days in a row, I get to kick off my conference with the two most successful DuPont spins of all time. This is obviously my favorite. Don't tell John Kempf upstairs. This time it is Corteva, ticker CTVA. Today with us we have David Johnson, who's the CFO and future CFO of Vylor, the seed spin. I should say seed and technology, I suppose we should say. Sam Eathington, who's the Chief Technology Officer, and I think they added digital into your job title as well recently. Obviously a lot going on, and I'm looking forward to discussing that. I've had the pleasure of knowing both David and Sam for many years, and I look forward to nerding out for the next half an hour on agriculture. Nothing gets my day started better than that. I think when I sit down, we have some good news to share with the crowd. Excellent. I'm going to drop the prepared questions. We were joking. I personally thank Chuck for going over to Europe right now and talking to make sure the EU has now officially announced it is, I'd say, beginning to implement the approval of gene editing. Sam, you and I were just speaking. This is something we've waited for. Long time. Maybe you longer. For me, 10 years. Yep. It's amazing how things can take that long, and I'm feeling a little older. Yeah. I would love to start off with that, what it means to you, what it means to Vylor. Perhaps, what it opens up in terms of the Vylor thesis. Obviously, there's a lot going on, and we can circle back, but I'd love to hear initial thoughts on what I perceive as a great announcement. Yeah, no. Great. Thanks, Chris, for hosting us. It is pretty exciting. Just a couple of hours ago, the EU Parliament actually voted to accept what they call their NGT, so that's their gene editing policy. This really starts the opportunity to bring gene edited products, not only just for importation, but actually cultivation now in the European market. Think about that. They've had a GMO ban for 30+ years. Now they're actually getting on board with really the technology and the opportunities that gene editing unlocks. We still got about two years of grinding through the implementation phase. There's a lot of stuff that still has to be written and how it gets done. This is a huge step forward versus we were saying, like 10 years ago, when they basically banned gene editing also, which was a real slowdown to the technology and the opportunity. What it really means to us is we've got a strong footprint over there in agriculture seeds. Both our corn, our oilseed rape business, for example. We've got gene edited products in corn, for example. One we talk about is our multi-disease-resistant product, where we've used gene editing to enhance the disease resistance that's already in corn. But we made a really complete package so that a grower doesn't have to choose, am I going to select the hybrid that's resistant to southern rust, or one that's resistant to gray leaf spot, or something else? Each year, they're trying to make that choice. If they're wrong, they've got to go out and manage that field differently. We've been testing this concept now for about five or six years. We actually have a nice pipeline of multiple genes and concepts ready to go. Just to give you an example, last year, the U.S. had a really big southern rust infestation. Farmers were spraying fields, sometimes twice. If they didn't spray, sometimes they were losing up to 80 bushels of yield per acre in their corn crop. This is in my home state in Illinois. Our Disease Super Locus actually looked outstanding, and we had lots of trials where it was 40 to 50 bushels above the control. Think about that being available in your seed, and you don't have to worry about how to spray, when to spray, what to spray for. All that decision is really simple. You just buy the right seed up front. We can now bring that technology, in theory, to Europe. Right? Bringing really enhanced genetic technology to Europe in corn and oilseed rape that just we couldn't do before. It's a pretty exciting time for the seed industry, I'd say. It's a great move for where Vylor is going. Gene editing is going to be core to who we are. I think, if you think about the bigger picture, a lot of countries look to Europe for the regulatory standards. This really changes the conversation, what's going on in China, for example. Which is still, we need approval because our grain moves around the world, so we got to have import approval, so we still got some work to do. This really helps with the conversation in a lot of countries. I think for those who like pictures, a couple of quarters ago, we actually had a picture of one that had our gene edits in and one that didn't. If you look at that picture, it's pretty clear the technology capabilities. One of the things I just wanted to very quickly go over in understanding we're pulling a bit of an audible this morning based on the positive news flow. Could you just remind people in the audience and perhaps on this webcast today, what gene editing actually is? It's different than GMOs in terms of the old school nomenclature. Also, I don't want to spoil it, but you also have a very unique standing in terms of your intellectual property that has been longstanding, in some cases multi-decades long. In some cases, within the last decade, so you're very firmly well-positioned in this, and I'd love for you to share your thoughts on that as well. Oh, great. Yeah, good callout. We tend to sometimes forget where we're at. GMOs, genetically modified organisms, really back in the 1990s was created, and this is where we took DNA from a different species and put it into a row crop. Think about corn and soybeans. This is how we got glyphosate resistance, insect resistance. We took genes from other species and moved those across into corn and soy, cotton, as an example. In gene editing, we only work with the genes and the variation that's already in that species. All right. We're not transgenic. We're not bringing in genes from other species. It's already there. Think about our corn Disease Super Locus. Those genes are already in corn somewhere around the world. Right? All we did was use this technology to find them and then quickly introgress them and move them into our germplasm. Something we could've done with plant breeding. This is what's really helped in the conversation in Europe is, you could do this with plant breeding. It's just now we can do it a lot faster, a lot cleaner, a lot better than what we could've done through traditional plant breeding procedures. That's been really the shift and the change. Now it gets a little muddy sometimes because you could use gene editing to do GMOs and all sorts of things. The simplest way is there's no foreign DNA. It's within the genetics that species already has. I would just remind people in the audience, the first GMO crop that was for cultivation was 1997, I believe is Roundup Ready canola. This is now probably perhaps one of the largest technological evolutions that we've seen in almost 30 years. The interesting thing is, we can do stuff with gene editing we were not successful at doing with GMOs. For example, there are no GMO disease control products in the marketplace. Right. We all spend a lot of money working on yield and stress and GMOs and very little success in that technology. Yet we see in gene editing already success in disease. We see products coming through our pipeline already with yield enhancements and improvements we've never seen before. We think there's opportunities. We think about insect control. There's people working on herbicide control, or weed control with herbicides. I think it's just actually going to open up the space of what genetics can solve. You start rolling into, it's a cheaper cost structure. Right. If we don't have to go through all the regulatory hurdles and burdens that we do today, we can actually work on additional product concepts. There's a lot of concepts we leave behind because the return on them is just not there. It's going to be more concepts, more crops, more geography. It really expands our where to play as an industry. I think one other point I want to make. Whenever you think about Corteva itself, you have to have that base germplasm. All this technology is fantastic, but you have to have something to edit. When you look at something like Pioneer, which is going to be 100 years this year. It is this year. It's 100 years of germplasm. When we look at our IP and what do we think is one of the most important assets we have as Corteva, it's starting with that germplasm. That allows or enables a lot of this technology. On the IP front, we branded this Genlytix as the ecosystem that we're calling it. In September, we'll update you. It's amazing just in the last two years how much it's expanded. A lot of IP. We're also doing lots of license. We have a lot of collaborations. We have a lot of third-party investment opportunities. We're taking a very broad look at the technology, including a number of things we're doing with social acceptance and really helping people feel like we're transparent and explaining what's going on and not be afraid of the technology. Let's take a step back to Well, it's still integral to it. Let's take a step back to last September when you announced the spin. David, I suppose we could focus this initially with you, and Sam, obviously feel free to chime in with anything incremental. What was the initial thesis 12 months ago in terms of where we stand today? You are going to do a couple CMDs in September, basically a year in. Can you just talk about what you think, especially in your new role, what the thesis is on the seed business for those of us that have covered this as an integrated company, whether pre-DowDuPont or after as Corteva. Could you highlight a few thoughts there, perhaps integrate what gene editing means to that what I perceive as optionality. I would love to hear your thoughts on that. Sure. Thank you for the question. I think when we think about the independent seed company, or we like to call it a genetics company going forward, because I think our aperture or our thought process is a little bit broader than what the business is today. For me, it's all around strategic, just focusing in on those growth opportunities around gene editing, our licensing business, some very exciting things like hybrid wheat, all these new opportunities we have. I look at it as more of a focus ability to have the separate company. I think there are some value unlocks that may be a little bit surprising to people. Whenever you look at Corteva today, by and large, the businesses are operating differently, even within the Corteva business today. Because when you look at CP, it's essentially a global specialty chemical company with an R&D element to it. It operates as a global functional business. When you look at seed business, it's a very regional business. When you look at Sam's R&D operation, it's many locations in every region around the world because you have to be able to develop and produce within that region. When I talk about a value unlock for seed and CP, it's getting these organizational structures and the operations around that focus around either a global functional business or this regional business. Quite frankly, Corteva today had some costs to keep that together. I think that's a pretty exciting element. I think the other one is just focus on capital deployment and what we can do there. I think whenever you look at two separate businesses, I do believe in the CP business, there's going to be opportunities for more collaborations, more opportunities in that market. That may be as a combined Corteva business, we'd focus a little bit more on the seed business, given the returns and so on and so forth. I think the jump balls for capital would typically go to the seed business. I don't think that's appropriate. I think it's better whenever it's separate. Then for us, we don't know this yet, but as a separate seed company, could there be more independent seed companies that would be very much more interested in being part of Vylor? I think that that's an opportunity. Then just seeing how far we can go with adjacencies and what have you, whenever you think about gene editing broader than just row crops. I think around strategic focus, capital deployment, and a little bit of a value unlock are the main items I think about whenever we think about the separation. Sam, when we once again take a step back and we look at the initial Vylor thesis in seed, there's also a lot. I don't want to dismiss anything that's going on the GMO side. You've been working for, once again, perhaps well over a decade, likely to further enhance the E3 platform. There's some things in terms of replacements for the Qrome platform, triple stacks, Conkesta in Brazil. I don't want to take away from the excitement that you likely contain there as well. I'd love to hear your initial thesis on that opportunity as well, and then perhaps we can branch off from there. Yeah, no, great. It's easy sometimes to lose that. If you just roll the clock back, as a company, we in-license most of our biotechnology traits. We paid a lot of royalties. We've been shifting that over time to where it's moving more to what's our own, either co-developed or proprietary traits. This will bring royalties down to essentially neutral and positive this year. As we look forward, we're actually moving to a higher percentage of proprietary developed traits. You mentioned we have a replacement for, in Latin America, Conkesta is an insect control trait. It's a really, really important trait down there. We've just launched it a few years ago. We'll be a mid-teen percent already of market share on that trait. We've already got the next generation biotech trait ready to go that enhances durability and scope of that insect control. It looks fabulous. It's in the field, it's in varieties. We're testing it, et cetera. That's already there. Same thing on the corn side. You mentioned we have platforms like Qrome, insect control. We've got Vorceed. We're now going to a new triple. We've got actually new genes for above ground and below ground insect control for North American market and above ground control for our Latin American market. These will now be 100% proprietary. They're kind of unique in some cases. We got some of the genes out of actually ferns. A lot of the history has been some sort of bacterial gene, maybe one or two RNAi genes, and we actually are going to be bringing some of the first genes from ferns out into the marketplace. Those give us all sorts of new things to think about. Well, what stack combinations do we want? How do we want to out-license those traits to other companies? How do we want to deploy them in the market? That base of germplasm and biotech traits, we just see it getting stronger and stronger all the way out into the middle part of the next decade. Then we get to build on hybrid wheat, biofuels, gene editing, adjacent spaces. That's why we feel really good about where Vylor's going. Just you mentioned, well, first of all, I just want to take a step back for something, for those that aren't aware of it. Please correct me if I'm a little bit off. Right. We're coming from a - $850 million ±. Like $700 million when we spun. When you spun. Okay. If you look at today, we're going to be neutral this year. We actually said we're going to be slightly positive this year. You think about that margin journey over a fairly short period of time. That's why you see the margins of the business going up into the upper 20s. We also said that by mid next decade, we expect it to be like $1 billion opportunity for Vylor. One of the things you did even prior to these announcements in terms of the biotech optionality and out-licensing, was there was a litigation with Bayer. Which obviously has lasted a very, very long time. It was something that most of us just read once a year on page 210 of the 10-K. Took some notes, asked, gave a few questions, and moved on. Exactly. Could you basically speak to what that settlement, it seems like you've done a lot of cleaning up for this thesis and for the spin. If you could take a step back and share your thoughts on that as well, it'd be greatly appreciated. Yeah. When you think about the Bayer agreement, it did a few things for us. One, it gave us a little bit more certainty about certain molecules after patent, so post-patent opportunities there. That enabled us to do a few things. We're able to introduce some new products like the triples literally in the next two years, versus when we thought it'd be early 2030s. Okay, that was a big move up for us for that opportunity. I think on the other side, part of that equation is reducing the net in-licensing expense. That was one that we saw a benefit also with that agreement, and that's why we're now saying that we're going to be positive this year, Chris, which would be about $120 million+ better than last year. A really nice increase in margin. I think just generally speaking, it reduces the uncertainty and puts everything kind of behind us whenever it comes to our relationship with Bayer. Yeah, I think you hit it well. It removed some uncertainty. It gave us some clear paths of what we could do with some products. It was financially a good deal for Corteva and Vylor, and made sense to sort of clean up some of the past. In terms of just perhaps wrapping up this topic, and we can move on to a few other exciting things. I'm not asking you to preview September, fear not. When you take a step back and you look at the gene editing optionality in terms of you've had this pendulum, you're swinging thus far, very slightly into positive territory this year. There's still some net licensee payments going on for sure. Now you have this wonderful GMO portfolio as step one, then kind of this step two in terms of really getting that pendulum into positive territory for you on the gene editing side. Could you speak to just perhaps kind of the balance of those two things? Are they roughly equal? Is it too early to tell? I would love to hear your thoughts in terms of just the longer-term trajectory without putting any dates on it. In the simplest way, I'd put it this way, that we're still really very much a GMO sort of value equation, even well into the early part of the next decade, right, mid-decade. Which means we have time to keep building all the gene editing stuff on top. From a research point of view, since we're thinking about 10 years out, we've made a much harder shift to, "How much is gene editing and how much is GMO?" At the product commercial space, it'll be very heavy GMO and germplasm still for another five, eight years. Plenty of runway on that even well without the gene editing if we could still call it optionality, perhaps. The initial pathway that you've been discussing is basic GMO. Yeah. Got it. The way I like to think about it, Chris, when you think about the near-term financials, like the next several years, three, four years, whatever, a lot of that is already somewhat predetermined. We're talking about net licensing improvement. We will still have our price mix, we believe, because Sam's group will continue to have improved yields that we're able to price off of and productivity improvements. I like to think the near term, that playbook, very similar than what we've seen in the last several years. When you start talking about the mid 2030s, I know that's a long time for some of us, that's when we start to see probably a real, I would say, hybrid wheat will be starting to become more material into the P&L. I would say things like biofuels, when you start thinking about the SAF requirements in Europe and some of the joint ventures we have made, what have you, we should see more of a material kind of accretion to the P&L in the mid-2030s for that. This continuation of the net out-licensing, we'll probably continue to see that through 2035. Probably gene editing and what have you is kind of even beyond that. I like to think of it in three time phases. I think the one very proven model we've had for a short period of time, we should see that as improvements year-over-year through the early 2030s. You beat expectations on that, I think, 3x in the last 18 months. I think we're building. Chris, I'm a little conservative sometimes. I'll take it. All right, let's move on to the thesis. One of the biggest debates, and I don't want to lead you in terms of the actual numbers, but one of the biggest debates has been the dyssynergies between the two platforms and this belief that, "Oh, everything has to be the integrated model," which in my defense, I never was with that. Even when you didn't like it. I take a step back and look at this. I don't even want to give you a number, but just how confident are you in terms of just breaking out? You already indicated that they are two separate R&D facilities, two separate teams. How should we think about that from both of your perspectives? Yeah. This is one of my favorite questions, I will say, because I think a lot of people are a little skeptical about how much we said it would cost to separate and then how much dyssynergies we would have because of separation. We've talked a little bit about it already. The R&D facilities are separate. There's literally no overlap in operations whatsoever. There is a little bit in commercial, but not the feet on the street. It's more the management layers and so on and so forth. When we think about it, we initially said we'd have a net $100 million of net EBITDA dyssynergies. Then we recently said we'd be a little bit favorable to that. We start talking about what does that mean. The increased cost side is going to be there. We're going to have two boards. We have two executive teams. We have some more IT licensing costs. All these sort of things will still be there, although maybe a little bit less than what we had initially thought, Chris. Really where we're making it up is on the opportunities to, again, right-size both businesses to their operating model, like I had mentioned before. We also said during our last earnings call, right before that, we had initiated a new restructuring program to be able to handle kind of how we're going to get these org structures put together. As we went through splitting out the 20,000-some people and we get this org structures, we are able to save some of that money. We will give an updated number at our next earnings call, but I would say that we're trending pretty significantly favorable to that initial estimate. I always find it ironic that when Corteva was created, you divested Stine and not a single sell-sider wrote a note and said, "Oh my gosh, the R&D dyssynergies are in there." It's like, "What? Wait, what? Exactly. Doesn't make any sense. That seems like it's going on track as well. Is there anything else just before you kind of shift topics, is there anything else that you're? There's obviously a lot to be excited about. That particularly excites you about, Sam, you've obviously been behind a lot of the launches that have enabled Corteva to steal a lot of market share. Is there anything that's particularly exciting that we haven't yet discussed here today? Look, I wouldn't ignore our hybrid wheat product. It's a pretty incredible technology and where it's going. Look, I've worked on hybrid wheat multiple times in my career and t here's always been this challenge of can you get a system that's consistent, that you can actually make hybrids, produce seed at the right cost, get the purity and quality that a grower needs? That's what has been the limit of the hybrid wheat system. We spent decades solving that, and we continue to look outstanding. We can really produce hybrids, they yield more, and we're running towards a launch here in 2027. It'll take a little time, obviously, to change the market, build the market, think about where to deploy that and use that around the world. If you look at what 100 years of hybrid corn did, we're just about ready to unlock the same thing in wheat. It's pretty cool. Now you start to say, "Gosh, if hybrid wheat is the base, well what do we get to do with gene editing in wheat, and what do we get to do with seed treatments in wheat?" Who knows? Maybe we'll get back to GMOs in wheat. It's really building a whole new pillar for a crop that's on +500 million acres around the world. To be clear, that was going to be my next question. You've highlighted that as roughly a $1 billion opportunity. Which is fantastic. I can tell you from spending some time with Chuck over the years, when I asked a similar question, "Hey, what are people not talking about?" Number one response. Okay. Perhaps I need to write about it a little bit more. One of the other things that is fascinating about the industry is, and we got back to it at the beginning of this conversation, breeding is still the core. Having the base germplasm and the varieties and the hybrids matters more than what most investors believe, and I've been discussing that since 15 years ago. Perhaps it's maybe in my eyes the first innovation in this. I'm sure there have been 20 in the last 10 years or so. AI has the potential, potentially, to shorten a lot of breeding cycles. It seems as though you would have, based on your library, a tremendous, let's say, competitive moat and optionality yourself in terms of because you have the access to the history. Others I'm sure are going to pop up and this and that, and say, "Well, now we can basically try to catch them and run you down." How would you perceive that as an opportunity? Would you be perhaps willing to share a risk or two? However you're thinking about it would be great. Maybe to unpack that. As you mentioned, there's a tremendous amount of knowledge that we have. We're 100 years of corn breeding history. We genotype 1 billion markers a year, so we understand the genetics on that stuff. We're running 15 million yield plots on this stuff every year. We characterize and understand this germplasm at the genetic level and at the phenotypic plant level. You can't imagine, right? It's one of the world's class biggest things out there. You get to add on, okay, how do I use AI to enhance all that? We've been running a very large AI program in R&D. David sometimes criticizes me for how much I spend on it. We've been pouring a lot to, even historically, things like machine learning languages were been around a long time. They're very powerful what we can do in the plant breeding program. Now you look at the generative AI sort of stuff, it's even more interesting. We've actually enabled teams to run whole new breeding concepts. We actually have AI agents that are plant breeders. They are running plant breeding programs, right? You think about how fast they can make decisions and use all this information available to them. It's pretty cool, and we're watching what they can do and how they can do it. Then you throw on there gene editing, and I think this is something that maybe gets missed a little bit is the interplay between AI and gene editing, right? It's like I can use AI to, today we can, for example, with 95% accuracy, predict the gene expression change based on the gene edits we're going to make now from our AI agents, right? Up front, our geneticists and breeders are designing how they want those genes changed and what genes to work with, and then how to use AI to design the actual gene-edited construct. On the back end, you're sorting through genetic variability and complexity that you've never seen before with AI. We've used it really end to end. We're seeing some incredible uplifts in efficiencies and capabilities and what I would say building the types of products and the product selection that we're getting. We still yield test. [audio distortion] Got to go out on the field and improve, it actually works at yield and looks right and behaves right. Farmers gonna be happy with it. We don't skip that stage, right? We still got regulatory in lot of cases deal with but the front end and a power of the pipeline just getting ramped up and we think about that combination of your germ plasm capabilities in knowledge with gene editing with AI, it's nice little triple plus of the replicate. Just add one thing, too. Whenever you decide what you do want to produce, the ability to produce at scale, there's very few companies that can do that. We're also using AI to help us. When's the best way to produce seed, where, when, so on and so forth. I think that's a capability of Vylor going forward that a lot of people miss out. They always spend a lot of time on the gene edits or the GMO or the new hybrids or whatever, but how do you actually get it to market? That whole piece of our business is a capability, like I said, probably only two companies can do in the world. Yeah, we have a complete digital twin of our seed manufacturing process. I tried to keep you and Bayer separated today. You're upstairs, they're downstairs. It's a safe distance. First of all, thank you. I want to give you the opportunity to answer one last question, and it's very simple. I want to give you an open floor. When you think about the opportunities for Vylor, what does it look like five years ago, 10 years ago? Feel like you already hit a couple highlights, but what's your vision once this was publicly announced last September? For me, I go back to that short, medium, long-term. Whenever Chuck talks about an overall genetics company kind of thinking a little bit differently, I think that's kind of where my mind goes. Near term, maybe not a lot of difference, although pretty exciting and continuing the journey we're on. Kind of that mid decade, starting to think of a third crop like wheat, starting to think about things like SAF and all these different fuel options and what have you. I think that's super exciting. Then gene editing beyond that. To me, I think it's a pretty bright future. I think David said it well. Look, as a plant breeder geneticist, I wish I was 20 years younger because I think when we get 5, 10, 15, 20 years out, we're going to look back at gene editing, what it did to this entire plant space, animal space, and say, "Holy cow, look what it just did." Assuming we get all the regulatory and social stuff worked out, which we're working hard on, the opportunity that's in the genetics of species to unlock that, we've got tools we've just never had before and capabilities we never had before. We're creating plant-breeding genetic populations the world has never seen, right? That's where we're at today and what this innovation is doing. Who knows what it's going to unlock, but it's going to be pretty amazing. As long as you promise not to change your GICS code to biologic or anything healthcare. Yeah, exactly. Yep We'll be good. I'm looking forward to covering it. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, all.