Thank you, Nathan. Thanks to our shareholders for dialing in this morning to listen to the summary of our quarterly activities for March 2021. First of all, on behalf of the board and shareholders, I'd like to extend our thanks to the site team who continue to do a magnificent job in challenging circumstances. In particular, our Fly-In Fly-Out expats, and some of our people are coming up for five stints in quarantine, which is a real challenge. Given that the executive team has recently been on site, so myself, Lyndon Hopkins, our Chief Operating Officer and Executive Director, Padraig O'Donoghue, our CFO, Stu Cruickshanks, our GM Tech Services. We're all actually sitting in hotel quarantine here in Perth. We've just been to site, and we're just finishing our first week, and we're looking forward to getting out next week.
This is mostly for myself and Stu and Padraig. It's two or three times. I think Lyndon's done at least four stints in quarantine in the last 12 months. It's certainly something we're managing, but it is challenging. The good thing about doing the trip was it was a great chance to see the operations that have changed in the last 12 months. Really pleased to see the progress with open pits, the undergrounds, and also see some of our social initiatives like schools, hospitals, and some of the community programs that we've been rolling out over the last year. On a positive note also, it was good to see our national hiring policy. Excuse me. Improving our training programs are paying off.
Our operating entity in Burkina Faso, SOMISA, currently has more than 90% indigenous employment, so people from the local area and from other regions in Burkina Faso. Just over 20% of our workforce is female as well. That's a really positive note. Also while we're in Burkina, we managed to hold some really positive meetings with delegates from the government of Burkina Faso, from various departments, the mines, finance and tax. Really positive meetings and we're buoyed by the government support for the project and the company. Moving on to health, safety, and environment. During the quarter, we had no significant social health or safety incidents. We have now worked more than 6 million hours without an LTI, and our TRIR is currently less than the West Australian average. That's a great credit to the team on site.
We've maintained continuous mining and milling operations, during the quarter. We still see COVID as a significant risk. Obviously, everyone's watching what's going on in India and other parts of the world. Further disruptions with international travel, I think, are likely. Given that we've just been through it, we kind of understand that intimately. Look, the measures that we've implemented, we expect to sort of continue for the foreseeable future. That includes following health and safety guidelines with social distancing, temperature checking, testing before you leave Australia, testing when you arrive in Burkina Faso, testing before you leave Burkina Faso. There's a lot of structure around that, and we'll continue doing that for the foreseeable future. Just on production, we've had another solid quarter with ounces up and costs down.
Q1, we produced nearly 56,000 ounces of gold at all-in sustaining costs have been reduced from $992 last quarter to $957 an ounce this quarter. We averaged $1,800 per ounce in unhedged gold sales. We're currently tracking really well against the production plan and guidance that we released in March. We're on track to meet the range of 250,000-280,000 ounces of gold produced at $720-$800 an ounce. Moving on to the underground. Mine ounces were about 30% below the previous quarter, and ore tonnes were down about 7%. Ore grade was down as well, against the previous quarter. We're still actually picking up quite a bit of mineralization from outside the mine plan, which we're taking the opportunity to mine when we're actually there.
During the quarter, we completed 802 m of underground development versus 510 m in the previous quarter. At the end of the quarter, the decline was 315 m below surface. As you can see from the numbers, during the quarter, our production cycle moved from stoping to backfilling and development. What we're really doing is setting up the rest of 2021 to focus on stoping activity. We're putting in that development and hard work now, and it'll be paying off throughout 2021. On open pits, mine ounces were down on previous quarter by 5% with a higher strip ratio. However, that's generally due to mining the M1 South open pit. Now, this resulted in a 35% increase in grade. The grades lifted from 1.3 g in Q4 last year to 1.9 g in Q1 this year.
On processing, the process plant continued its solid performance, as it has done since we started up last year. As mentioned earlier, gold produced was just under 56,000 ounces with a 10% increase in head grade to 2.3 g per tonne, last quarter compared to 2.1 g per tonne in Q4 last year. Recoveries are steady as well at 94%. Mill throughput was in line with last quarter. Just running through the financial and corporate review. We finished the quarter with $94 million cash on hand. We had AUD 39 million generated in cash from operating activities. We finished the quarter with about $31 million in unsold bullion, and that's just due to the timing of gold shipments, which was a bit higher than what we had last quarter. We also made our first scheduled debt repayment to Taurus of $13 million.
We also made an additional $25 million debt repayment just after the end of the quarter, reducing the Taurus loan balance to $137 million. We basically paid down $38 million in debt in one quarter, which is quite an achievement. At the end of the quarter, notional debt decreased by $25 million to $76 million. We're making good progress on that front as well. Moving on to growth. During the quarter, we released our updated resources, reserves, production guidance, and a 10-year production outlook. Resources ticked over 5.1 million ounces at 2 g, which is a great outcome for the company. That's with the addition of Toega and extensions at M1 South. Ore reserves. There were no real change in ore reserves except for depletion.
We expect that by the end of this year, we'll be bringing Toega into ore reserves and also portions of the M1 South underground. We'll expect that to lift. We also provided guidance for production for 2021, which I mentioned earlier. We also provided a 10-year production outlook of over 216,000 ounces from average production from 2021 to 2030. That's a significant improvement on our previous life and mine plan. I'd just guide investors to have a look at the announcement we made on the 9th of March, which is lodged on the ASX and on our website, if anyone needs any further detail on that. We've been progressing Toega during the quarter as well. Feasibility studies are ongoing and permitting work is well in hand.
We completed geotechnical drilling and samples for geotechnical, and metallurgical test work samples were made ready for shipping, and they'll be shipped very soon from Burkina back to Perth. We're currently infill drilling at Toega, and we expect to finish that drilling by the end of this quarter. On other exploration. We have been doing some auger drilling programs in the west of Burkina at the [Kamoa] project. We've also got an auger rig at the MV3 or V3 permit, which is just to the west of Sanbrado. We've also completed a historical data review over V3, and it turns out there has been some historical drilling on that permit, with some RC drilling returning 16 m at 5 g beneath workings. We'll be following these up with RC drilling later this year, once we've finished all the auger work and mapping.
We expect to finish the auger programs in Q3, and then we should be in a position to go through the data and work on target definition for next field season. Moving on to our objectives for next quarter. We're obviously focusing on delivering the guidance, so increasing gold production and reducing per ounce costs. We want to finish the drilling at Toega, the infill drilling, which is the plan to increase resource category and convert resources into reserves. We'll crack on with the auger drilling campaigns at Sanbrado and [Kamoa]. That's the sort of high-level coverage for the quarter, and I'll pass back to Nathan for any questions. Thank you.
Thanks, Richard. If you would like to ask a question, please enter it into the Q&A panel within Zoom. Your first question comes from Roger Fitzpatrick from Fitzpatrick Family Office. There is two questions. The first one is: When can shareholders expect to be paid a dividend, or will you be concentrating on paying back the debt?
All right. Thanks, Nathan. Thanks, Roger, for your question. Certainly, our focus this year is to pay down the debt. You can see we've just made a pretty big inroad into it this quarter with $38 million paid back since our last quarter. That's reduced our overall debt down to $137 million. Later this year, we'll, I guess, focus on what we do for next year, and that's whether we pay a dividend or whether we buy back shares. That'll be something we're considering. This year, we focus obviously on debt repayment, and I think if the gold price stays around where it is, we should have the debt cleared with Taurus. Well, certainly, we should be net cash by the end of the year and have the loan paid off in Q1 next year. Thanks.
The second question: What is the exploration budget for the company this year, and where will it be spent?
The exploration budget so far for 2021 is about $12.5 million. Most of that's being spent on the Toega feasibility study. We're obviously very focused on converting the inferred resource at Toega into a higher category, and then getting reserves into our mine plan. The life of mine plan that we put out in March includes some inferred resources. Our focus is delivering that and converting inferred into Indicated and Measured categories. Like I said, we've got two auger rigs operating at the moment. We have one near MV3, which is very close to Sanbrado. We've got one out at [Kamoa], which is working on a new grassroots project. [Kamoa] is a collection of about three or four permits. It's in a really good location in a nice geological setting, and we look forward to sort of releasing some results from that later this year.
We've also got some exploration to do around Sanbrado, which we will be moving on to after we finish the infill drilling at Toega. That's the current focus. We think there's really quite a high probability of adding ounces from the surrounding area around Sanbrado, in addition to organic growth from our early stage of grassroots exploration programs. Thanks, Nathan.
Thank you. Your next two questions come from Mike Millikan at Euroz Hartleys. The first one's regarding M1 South underground grades, and he's asked regarding the M1 South underground grades, should be tracking, how are they going to be tracking in the current quarters, i.e. any additional ores outside the mine plan, mix between stope and development ores, and results from any reconciliations?
Right. Thanks. The last quarter, we were just under 8 g per ton for the average grade. That included a lot of development ore and also some hanging wall zones outside the mine plan. What we found is that there's some areas that are kind of hard to define from grade control drilling. When we've been doing the longitudinal ore drives, which the first three levels of the underground mine have seen that we've had to go and chase some of these zones with sludge drilling after the ore drive development. That did kind of slow us up a little bit with the overall sequencing of stoping and backfilling. The part of the ore body that we've been mining to date has been in the southern end, and also these sort of hanging wall zones.
We're moving into the main part of the orebody now, which is the second panel, which is closer to the core of the mineralization. So we expect kind of grades to improve from here. Like I said earlier on, in this quarter, we focused a lot on development, really setting ourselves up for big two quarters, the final two quarters of this year, which we're almost entirely in stoping ore. So the development that we're putting in now is between the 2,070 and 1,995. Surface level is 2,300, and we've got generally 25 m levels from the 2,170 down to 1,995, which have been developed. And if investors remember our exploration story, we hit a lot of high-grade mineralization not long after we made the discovery. And most of those results have actually come from that 2,070 to 1,995 level.
That's where the orebody kind of joins back together, and we've got one solid pipe. That's where we've got transverse development. We're going across the orebody, and that's something that I've seen just recently when I was on site. That looks very good. We expect grades to pick up. We don't see any issues around the life of mine grade. I think that kind of covers that question off. We expect the bulk of the tonnes to come from stoping the back end of this year, and we've still got a bit of development to do this quarter. We're going back into a stoping cycle by the end of Q2.
Thank you.
Thanks, Nathan.
Stuart Dodd from Renaissance also asked a question about the underground and reconciliation. I think you've covered it there. The last one from Mike is: When should we expect drill results from Toega, and the timing for the resource update?
Right. We can expect some results from Toega later this quarter, and we'll be releasing those into late in the quarter into Q3. We will update the resources in line with our annual resource reserve update, which we'll be working on late this year and then releasing in January. Sorry, January 2022.
No worries. Thanks, Richard. There's no further questions at this time, so I'll hand back to you for closing remarks.
Thanks, Nathan. Look, thanks to our shareholders again, and thanks to our site team for doing a good job. We look forward to keeping investors updated with progress throughout the quarter. That's about it. Thanks very much. Cheers. Bye