S&W Seed Company (NASDAQ:SANW) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

And so we think, that bids well for our sorghum product line. To your question of how does sorghum compete with corn I think we’re just starting to learn that, and the farmer community is starting to learn that they just didn’t have an option before to control grass weeds. And so, they planted corn because at least they can couldn’t control grass, weeds and corn, but now we’re giving them an option for sorghum. So we’re just tickling sort of that demand and farmer thinking piece on corn versus sorghum, and we think sorghums going to win. But it also depends on the price of corn relative to sorghum, and that depends on the Chinese market and lots of other things but in general, the water problem is a benefit to sorghum, and we think that we’re going to start seeing that in in your future here as water issues and the production states are tougher and tougher in the US.

Gerry Sweeney: Got it. And then on that side, I believe your forage product helps with digestibility and just curious if sort of the next steps the roadmap, is it similar to the DT sorghum right the herbicide resistant version? You had to grow seed to get more seed bring it out to the

Mark Wong: So, when I I sat on Monsanto’s board we were at the point in time at Monsanto where we were developing these trait stacks and trait stacks are incredibly valuable. The farmer gets to, to access these new technologies that basically they all make a money in one way or the other, right? And so with DT it’s this grass control with the new digestibility genes that we’re looking at. And one in particular it’s to be able to feed a storage, excuse me, a forage crop to his cattle in the US it would be mainly cattle in Australia where we’re also looking at its cattle and sheep, but the cows don’t get sick and they just — there’s to make the cow sick. We, find in our trials that we have a real problem with other animals, rabbits and other things, because during, I guess must take taste so good that they just come and eat it.

So we’re going to have to figure out how to keep these wild animals out of our seed fields because we did have some places where the animals basically ate our crop because the tastes so good and they didn’t get sick. So it’s a fascinating opportunity to put basically a digestibility gene on top of a herbicide gene. They’ll be — the two genes will be stacked in some markets. The two genes will be separate in other markets, depends on whether there’s a grass problem or not and we’ve been through this before at other companies, so it’s not new to us the thinking that we have to do, but it’s a great opportunity and we’re super excited that this new digestibility gene will sort of be where next year it’ll sort of be where DT was two or three years ago.

So it’s got it, it’s very exciting times in the near term for sorghum for us.

Gerry Sweeney: On the herbicide, you alluded or mentioned, at least I should say not alluded to, but going international, how do you do that? I don’t want to get the cart before the horse. It sounds like sales are pretty good here in the US, but what should we be thinking or what’s the market opportunity? How do you attack that market if you go international?