Yield10 Bioscience, Inc. (NASDAQ:YTEN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Sameer Joshi: Hey guys thanks for taking my questions and congratulations on the MOU and the agreements. Just a clarification on herbicide tolerance versus winter field testing programs; should we expect an additional round of testing to conduct these tests together? I’m looking at Slide 12 and the pins, the blue and the rather green and yellow pins are in different geographical regions. Wasn’t, it’s a plan to use both these traits at the same time.

Oliver Peoples: Yeah. So I think with regards the winters have a different variety. So what you’re Slide 13, just let me at the two seconds. Yeah. So Kristi. Yeah. Kristi, you want to speak to this and try what we’re doing here?

Kristi Snell: Yeah, so the blue pens, we’re testing different varieties of winter Camelina and different locations primarily centered around possible bio or crushing regions. Yellow pins are our contra season field trials for herbicide tolerance. Those are spring lines. So they are two different programs. There, we’re taking advantage of the warmer weather in the south to scale up feed and also do some testing of our spring lines in the off season. With winter HT, yes, we plan to put winter HT in the field for the first time this winter. We have very nice results in the greenhouse for over the top spray, and we plan to put both over the top spray and the group two lines into the field this winter for the first time.

Sameer Joshi: Understood. That’s what I was looking for. Thank you. And then since I have you Kristi, how long does this RSR approval take once you have filed?

Kristi Snell: Yes. So it’s supposed to take about 180 days, but they’re backlogs. So, we’re monitoring the situation and have been communicating with the USDA. We feel that it will be approved, sometime this year, but it’s really too late to say anything else besides that.

Sameer Joshi: Got it. Thanks. And just one last one, we have seen your MOUs with Mitsubishi American Airlines and this crasher buyer refiner, are you also talking to growers or will that come at a later stage or, are those growers the same guys who will — who are doing the — where the current field trials are going on?

Oliver Peoples: Yeah. So right now, Sameer we are actually — we have extensive outreach to growers. We’re actually building up a log of potential spring acres, obviously potential spring acres. So we are all been building that now for a couple months. It looks very good in terms of what we plan to do. So we’ll see how that goes. But we are really focused on the spring planting and building a lot of I would say interest from growers. And then we’ll have to decide just how much of this we really want to plant. And we’ll probably tie that into obviously that offtake agreement so that we marry those two things up. We just don’t plan to produce more grain than we can essentially get taken care of in terms of processing and conversion to biofuels.

It, won’t help us so much as progressing the technology, the new technologies, the advanced traits, herbicide, etcetera. That’s going to be a more meaningful impact for the company than just trying to grow acres so they can tell Wall Street, we grew an extra thousand acres. That’s not really helpful. Near term, the main thing is to work closely with these growers to build their relationships and to look at, not when they plant 160 acres, but when they plant 1600 acres because these farms and the way they operate, that’s ultimately what you want to happen.