-for coming. Our next presentation is going to be from Replenish Nutrients.
Thank you. Well, thanks everyone for coming in. Appreciate it. It's just after lunch, so I'll try not to put you to sleep right after that end of things. Again, appreciate it, and appreciate you guys not falling asleep. There's enough of you not here that I can actually keep an eye on everyone in the room, so I can smack them accordingly with the paper that I have over yonder. Anyway, Neil Wiens, CEO, CTO, chief bottle washer of Replenish Nutrients. We are a mineral-based, biologically driven regenerative fertilizer company. Quite a mouthful, I get it. At the end of the day, what it is we're looking at creating fertilizer via biology.
When we do that, we're suddenly slipping the whole plane of what everybody's been doing for the last 70, 80 years and creating something that is the right time, right place, and right form. I'll get into exactly what that ends up being and why that means something to you and why it actually is the whole reason why we're in here. Legal disclaimer. Same thing. If you guys want, you can go through that, it's basically our cap table. Give you a quick overview on what that looks like. That will be in our presentation material later. I'm not going to sit on it for any length of time. This is really the main reason why everybody's in here is why invest? To be honest, it's honestly about timing right now.
We can sit there and start to understand the Strait of Hormuz issues have gone out there, timing on that has become something. Everybody wants local product and everybody wants to have security of that local product. That part is timing. The other timing of it all is really, we've done the technology, we've gone through the patent process, we've finished the efficacy, we've done everything accordingly, we're taking that next step after we've done this forever. I think the final piece of this is, of course, it looks like in commercialization, I'm going to get into that a little bit further in the deck slides. Really, I was doing some major thought process before this as we were coming, last weekend before I came here.
I've done this previously, not via a pub co, not via anything like that, but as a private co, I have invented other fertilizers. When I did that, shockingly it was about an eight-year period from that end of things, from when I started it to when somebody actually finally noticed that Neil existed in the ag world and actually produced something that was very viable to the farmer as a commercial entity. After that eight years, sold it off and it did very well to another company. I looked in the mirror and reflected on that, and I'm going, "Okay, where am I at in timing with Replenish Nutrients right now?" Lo and behold, it's eight years again. Farming's a little interesting. It's not quite as quick as some other things where there's an uptick.
I'm a farmer by trade, I'm going to beat up on us a little bit. We just don't change very quick. You need that long-term thoughts process and thought solution to come through and, in particular in Western Canada, we got one shot at it every year. I got 120 days up there where it's not freezing and snow. You got to make sure that it works and guys are going to be confident before they actually want to show up.
The funny part of it all, when I talk about timing and talk about everything that's come here, it really has culminated into what the main reason we're here this week is the fact that we want to show everybody that the timing is right to not only invest, but the timing is right to understand why what we're doing is going to be very important to the fertilizer market in the next few years. We'll get into it a little bit more. If anybody has questions as we're moving forward, please interrupt. I'm not on a scripted side of it all, as you can probably tell by even that little mantra, but we'll go from there and away we go. Why is regenerative fertilizer all of a sudden become a major proportion of problem? It's funny. Again, I'm a farmer. I deal with farmers.
My dad's a farmer. Ultimately what happens is over the last 70 years, I'll go into every spot and have these conversations with the farmers in the crowd, and I ask them the question, "What's changed in agriculture in the last 70 years?" They raise their hand and go, "Hey, GPS we've had. We got a different technology in this. We've got genetics in this. We've got this." I'm going, "Okay, well, that's all cool, but what are your crop inputs and what feeds these crops?" "Well, it's NPK, it's urea, it's ammonium phosphate, and DAP and potash. It's all the same." I said, "Yeah, exactly. For 70 years, it's been the same." The last time I checked is most of us didn't hit the nail on the head on any invention day one 70 years ago.
There's got to be a reason why it's got to get better. That whole chemical fertilizer industry has been status quo, honest to goodness, for a 70-year period. We wonder why our soil is becoming higher salinity, wonder why all of a sudden the world is getting these green algae blooms in the Gulf of Mexico. We're wondering why Lake Erie turns green. All these little things that happen, and it really does point into the fact that we're running with a chemical water-soluble nutrient on a consistent basis and have never changed that thought process. Ultimately, it's not that it's wrong. Me as a farmer, I'm still using a water-soluble urea, and I still will because I haven't got a nitrogen product in my own archive yet.
I'm not going to go and crap on anybody on this, but ultimately, that's what this is all about. We came up with a different solution. Ultimately, what we're trying to do is I'm using some of the same ingredients that the Nutrien and Mosaic and Simplot of the world already use. Rock phosphate is a staple. That's one of them. What's cool about rock phosphate, Mother Nature did some pretty cool things with this, is it actually has phosphate in it. Shocking. On the other side, it has calcium, magnesium, iron, all the rest of the micronutrients that we all take as a vitamin supplement pill after we eat supposedly good bread.
The rock phosphate, if I then go and dive down into that just another step and look at what most plants in the globe actually need as a ratio of nutrients, rock phosphate, again, Mother Nature did this pretty cool, rock phosphate is actually almost identical to the amount of ratio that what a plant needs. It was funny, I watched and saw a little episode on, I think it was probably a National Geographic thing, but it showed the fact that the Sahara Desert, which is, of course, the largest area of rock phosphate on the globe Morocco, Egypt, Algeria area, that desert area, is all rock phosphate. They then showed the NASA satellite data of all this dust coming across and the particulate off through the sandstorms in the Sahara, and guess where it lands. Anyone has any idea?
Not here.
It doesn't land here. It lands in the Amazon rainforest. You want to know why that Amazon rainforest physically grows the way it does, is the majority of it is because it's getting fertilized yearly from the Sahara Desert. That's when you start to think, "You know what? There might be a connection to all this." A little interesting little tidbit on that end of things, but it's very cool on how the amount of what it actually has for runoff versus its regeneration side is identical to what they've actually measured on the atmospheric side. It's really cool. Ultimately what I'm doing is I'm taking that rock phosphate.
We take elemental sulfur out of the oil and gas side of things, again, another nutrient that isn't available to the plant as is, then we put them all together in a nice little blend of herbs and spices and let my microbiology action get away with this. Now all of a sudden, everything I'm always going to analogize a little bit because I'm an animal nutritionist by trade. It's a little bit weirdness, I always go with this, where I'm feeding the soil instead of feeding the plant. When we talk regenerative and regenerative soils and soil health, it is 100% what we focus on as a group, we go for that. We always have to talk about a balanced nutrition side, no different than us.
Right now, we had little sandwiches, plus we had a salad on the side, plus a little chocolate at the end. We're trying to do a full balanced diet, probably not the healthiest balanced diet, but we're always trying to do a balanced diet when we eat as human beings. The reason we do that is to keep our gut microbiome in great shape so that way it can actually physically attack anything that's bad. If we're healthy, shockingly, we can actually, what is it? Avoid getting sick or at least turn around and get unsick real quick. That's the same thing in soil.
What we've been doing over, it goes back into the whole commercial side of things, as we've been running and getting less and less biology in the soil, what's actually physically happened out there is we've made the soil, eh, not sick, but it's just not very reactive to things that are attacking it. Now all of a sudden, in the past 30 years, when I grew up, we hardly put a fungicide down. Right? Now all of a sudden, we're putting a fungicide down two, three passes a season, let alone once a season. Now all of a sudden, that fungicide, which is typically it's no different than an antibiotic in our own systems, it's not indifferent on who it attacks. It's attacking everything that's a fungus. Same thing with the antibiotic, right? That's the concept that we're all playing with here.
I'm not going to get heavy into the products other than what I just told you folks. Our main patent and what makes us different from everyone else is the fact that we physically keep the biology alive in our products throughout the whole season. When you take a look at the seasons, we're going to talk a little bit about the pelletization, which is our expansion model, and the granulation, and pass them around. Have a look. We'll start on each side. These are the pellets on this one side and the granules on the other side. It just gives you an idea on what I'm talking about and what the product looks like. It's your typical fertilizer product.
It's good for farmers to use logistically on their side of things, it ends up working well with chemical fertilizer because I can't make people, especially farmers, like I said, we're slow learners, to actually try and change very much instead of everything at once. We're not going to become organic overnight. There isn't a guy out there that's going to do that. Maybe there is, but there sure aren't going to be very many. On the commercial side, they're still going to want to use some urea, they're still going to want to be able to make it play nice with the rest of it. Hopefully that makes some sense. Here's the other part of this.
If I'd have done this probably, goes back into eight-year cycles, folks, if I'd have done this eight years ago and actually really started to push this into commercialization, my uptick would've been very painful. We've had a lot of companies over the past probably three years that have announced regenerative programs, and I'm sure most of you heard it. They want to have, like PepsiCo, they go, "We're going to do a regenerative program on their Lay's potato chips." You all of a sudden turn around and you have General Mills, "Hey, we're going to do this through our Cheerios." Everybody's announcing regenerative programs that they want for better food because we, as the consumer, are asking for more nutrient density.
We're starting to realize that our strawberries don't taste like strawberries anymore. We're starting to realize that our tomatoes have absolutely zero flavor, and that's because we don't put any nutrient density into it. That's the pull that's coming, and we're starting to get more and more of that. What's been really interesting, and this is more of a demographic side of it, but in the whole farming industry in North America right now, is the majority of it is starting to move to the next generation. Almost all the farmers, this is going to be one of the biggest land transfer times, this next five years is one of the biggest land transfer times in all of North American history.
Guys are retiring, getting out of this end of things, and everybody's starting to move it either to the next generation or to the next set of farmers that are going to come around. It's very important timing, and a lot of the guys that I'm dealing with are actually already now into that 30-50 range of demographic versus the 65-75. Because I've got to be honest, if I was to go and try and sell any of my product to my dad even, he'd tell me to go buzz off. Doesn't make any sense to him, right? That's the funny part of this all, is that demographic change is coming right now, and it's been coming hard, hence the reason you see what you see on the side right now. How do we do this? These are our facilities.
For the last two years, we haven't been all that terribly healthy, or we've been healthy as a company, but it doesn't look like it on the balance sheet, doesn't look like it in my financials. I'm not going to try and hide behind any of that. What it is we've spent all that time making sure that we're moving from a pilot facility to a commercialization facility. We've gone through, got our patents completed, we've got all the gremlins out of the building and figured out how to do this. By doing that, and the reason why we own our own facilities and don't just go to a straight license model is because the same thing.
If I go and tell somebody, "Hey, I can make that granule or make that pellet on a consistent basis," they need to come and touch, feel, and smell it. Otherwise, they are not going to invest in it. We need those facilities internally. They make us good revenue, they make us good money, and they allow us to actually get our formulas down pat. I can still play in the background because I'm a weird biochemist, I really am. I love to try, maybe not blow myself up, but just really try different things that are really cool with my ingredients. The other half of this thing is what it says here, is the expansion capital light side. We just announced here, would've been just before Christmas, that we did a deal with the Farmers Union Enterprises down in the U.S.
The main thing here in this country is the majority of farmers always run through a cooperative or some kind of union. If you're not part of that and available, you will never penetrate this market. We got very, very fortunate to find a great partner in the Farmers Union Enterprises, which consists of Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, which includes over 70 million acres of land and membership. That makes a big difference, too. Other part of it all, we did another license deal up in northern Alberta. This is the highest price point fertilizer in North America, is up in the Peace Country in northern Alberta. It's about 10 million acres up there. Our guy represents about 10,000 metric tons over the next year, is what his output is looking to be.
If he can do that'll cover approximately 100,000 acres of that 10 million acres of land. Just gives you an idea. This is the big one that I was just talking about, is ultimately with this licensing deal is the Farmers Union, which we've told people is actually physically getting down to its final commissioning stages here in the next month. It's going to start up soon. Now all of a sudden by Q3, we'll be commissioning that plant, and this actually will come into fruition. It's not pie in the sky anymore, folks. Goes back into timing. It's all stuff that is happening and is happening very quick and it's all at the same time. Here's the plant growth as we move forward. Ultimately, what we have is our own, there's my tonnages.
When you start figuring out what we're actually needing and what is the next catalyst, because somebody asked me that before, is what's our catalyst of stage growth? Right now, of course, we're cash flow negative. If I can turn around and get it to, of course, cash flow positive, that's a great catalyst. I'm turning around and we're making sure that in theory, it's about 2,000 tons. Again, that's up or down pending on commodity prices, but we'll give that as essentially what that CAD value is. 2,000 tons gets me about where I'm cash flow positive of production out of our own internal production. When you see an announcement that says, "Hey, we actually just produced 2,000 tons in a month in our thing," you're going to realize, "Holy cow, they actually hit cash flow at least of zero," right?
Anything over and above that I start announcing, whether it's through the Beiseker Hutterite Colony, or whether it's through the Farmers Union updates or anything else like that, is all gravy now over and above that zero rate side of it all. As investors, that's what you want to look at for when you're actually keeping an eye on us. Hopefully, you're going to do that after this conversation. That's ultimately what we're looking for. The pipeline to growth on that, really, the Farmers Union is one of it. As I mentioned with that other graph that we had out there, it's the 70 million acre potential in their members. When I go and produce the first 50,000 tons, all I'm really covering is half a million acres out of that 70 million.
Their goal is to physically make sure that their members have surety of supply as it moves forward, as I started off in this conversation. At that point, it's just, you know what? This is who we are. We're lean and mean. I have Matt along with me here, that's two-thirds of our C-suite hanging out. There isn't a whole bunch of extra excess, and I appreciate Matt doing what he has. He's made sure that we have a very lean and mean SG&A.
At this point, it's what we have is what we get. My hands are still dirty. I'm not lying to you when I'm saying I'm also chief bottle washer on this thing, too. We get out there because we want to make sure that we get this stuff done, and I got to smell like sulfur at the end of the day. Otherwise, my wife gets a little too close. Anyway, I'm just kidding. Ultimately, that's about it. Any questions?
What is it comprised of? What are the [audio distortion]
Yeah, the question was, what is in my fertilizer? What are the components? As mentioned, to start off, it's definitely rock phosphate is one of the main ingredients. All the time, I will run with elemental sulfur. That comes out of the oil and gas industry, which in Alberta, there happens to be a little bit of elemental sulfur. That's always a piece of it. What houses my microbes is we'll use always a local compost. In the case of being in Alberta, we happen to have a local compost source.
The wonderful thing about compost sources is the majority of the time is it's a waste product for somebody else, so I get it for relatively free. Ultimately, I use mushroom compost in my world. Down in Crookston, where we're going to do the Farmers Union, we're going to use a chicken manure compost, that's based on that. The final piece of my ingredients is potash, I'm only kind of stuck with potash out of Saskatchewan.
[audio distortion]
No. The question here is does it differ from traditional fertilizer? No, it really doesn't. It's not hard for people to grasp, that's why you got to do it. The only thing that's different is I'm not water-soluble right off the bat versus a chemical fertilizer. It's still the same PKS-type scenario, but I'm not water-soluble. When it has a big rain event, like we've been having in Alberta for the last while, suddenly that big rain event doesn't wash it down into the river system.
[audio distortion] that it's regenerative when it's largely similar to traditional fertilizers?
Yeah. How do I claim it's regenerative? I apologize, I'm paraphrasing because there's people online. How do I claim that it's regenerative? Is the fact that we do have microbial action. It isn't a salt, so it's not an acid-based reaction. It's not chemical. It's all biological. Normal fertilizer is always a chemical reaction of an acid and base. If you remember anything from chemistry, which I don't really assume anybody should, is that when you actually have an acid-based reaction, you will create a chemical salt. That's the problem. We're not growing seaweed. We're trying to grow corn, we're trying to grow soy.
Can you elaborate on that process? How it's different, your phosphate compared to Nutrien and those guys, per se.
Yeah. How am I different than chemical fertilizer?
Yeah.
Ultimately, again, we're not that acid-based reaction. What I'm not doing is I'm not doing that reaction. Almost every fertilizer tries to create a, we'll use ammonium phosphate. What it does is it tries to pull the phosphate out of that rock that I was talking about that has calcium, magnesium, iron, and everything, and it creates phosphoric acid. All of a sudden, you got to create the voodoo because I can't just go put acid on my land. They do, and they add ammonia, which is a base, and you get that 11-52-zero on the thing. That's that acid-based reaction, which is a salt. That's how this all works.
What's really weird about the whole thing is only 30% of that rock that they just grabbed out of Morocco, say Nutrien or The Mosaic Company, ends up being utilized in the process. The other 70% ends up in a waste gypsum pond. 100% of what I utilize is used. We do not have any waste products. We're not doing this, it's easy to permit it is to do everything else. I think I'm going to get the wave here in about 10 seconds, I assume. Oh, we're still good for a second. Okay. Oh, there we go. Yes.
If you're using different composts, different geographies, how can you guarantee [audio distortion].
Good question. How do I guarantee quality control when I use different composts? Give you the reason why I do it in the first place is every compost and every geography is a little bit different. Its biology composition is a little bit different the way we go. Generally, what it does when it's from that geography, it has the native population of biology. All of a sudden, I'm not trying to bring something in from Brazil into Northern Alberta and hope it plays nice in the sandbox. That's why I use that. It is a little bit different biology side of it all. When I do piece it together in all my blends, I do change the biology because of the elemental sulfur does some pretty cool things to it.
It generally morphs out to what I want it to be. I do have the same indigenous population then that always plays well with each other once I actually get rid of it. I do that specifically to make sure that I'm not making anybody sick that I don't want to.
Two questions, Neil. Do you have any white papers, case studies that you can point to that your fertilizer is equal to or better than traditional fertilizer? From a cost perspective, farmers are notoriously pretty grippy, understandably p roduct compared to traditional fertilizer input
Yeah, first question, do we have any efficacy papers that are third-party verified? Yes, we have lots of them. A nice little thing, we're actually going in a nice little package of probably about a four-pager, we've just finished working on that because I knew this was going to be a very good question. That'll be available on our website, and to anybody who actually contacts us, we'll get you those white papers. On the other question of it all, you're very correct on ROI. If I cannot justify the same ROI as what they are in chemical fertilizer land, the farmer will not use it. The reason being is that he's only got one shot.
Now, if all of a sudden we can do that. What we've done is I've made sure I'm a one-to-one value proposition, so that way their yield, and their yield never goes down, sometimes goes up, and it'll always go up over two or three-year times, but not day one all the time because you got to change things. What he ends up getting is his value proposition, he's not losing on this. Where he really starts to win is year two, three. His fungicide use starts to go down because it's starting to balance the whole biology side. His pesticide use goes down. He's suddenly got ladybugs in the field versus lygus bugs, and now he's actually quite happy and everybody wins. I think I'm out of time, though. I've got five seconds. Yep, there you go.
Do you have any support from government?
Oh, do I have support for government? If I'll quickly do that, yes, we have support from government on all sides all the time. We have one grant that is available here to us once we want to do the next in-house facility. It's about emissions reduction because we don't use near the energy as the big guys. That's the real quick answer on that one.
[audio distortion]
That is the target is because we are physically going to be rocking and rolling at 2,000 ton and over here between all our projects here very soon.
[audio distortion]
Yep.
[audio distortion]
If we hit all side of it all, we'd be at around that about CAD 12 million-CAD 14 million mark.
[audio distortion] . Then the cap table looks pretty horrific. How do you clean up the share count and everything else?
Well, the wonderful thing on that is It's not the wonderful thing, but one of the things is almost 42 million shares of the warrants come off the table here next week. On the warrant side of it all, there's not a whole bunch moving. The rest of the cap table, No different than I think any other small cap. I've had to keep going, getting revenue or revenue capital every once in a while. Hopefully we can get it to a point where it's worth doing something, maybe a reverse split in the future or anything like that.
Do you need to tap the markets to raise more capital in the near term?
If I have the right strategic partner, I'm never going to say no, but that's the only way we're going to do it right now is I don't need to go as a private placement or anything at this point. We're with about a CAD 4 million or CAD 5 million inventory level right now, along with cash in the bank. It's always tight, never going to lie on that, but we don't have to go and get private placement. All right. Well, thanks, folks