S2 E53: The Critical Role of Potash in Agriculture w/ Millennial Potash

Dustin Olsen (00:40)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Rare Earth Exchanges podcast. We are thrilled to have you back yet again. I'm Dustin joined by my cohost, Daniel. And today our guest is Farhad, who is the CEO of Millennial Potash. Potash, Yeah, Potash, yeah. I've heard it pronounced many different ways. So for our listeners, Potash is in the critical mineral space, which is a little different from

Farhad Abasov (00:56)
Yeah, that's correct. ⁓

Dustin Olsen (01:07)
the rare earth elements that we typically talk about. But Farhad is deeply involved in this. You've worked in the resource space for pretty much your whole career. So we're excited to kind of dive in and learn how this is valuable and where it's important in the market. So Farhad, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Farhad Abasov (01:24)
Hi, Dustin. Hi, Daniel. Great to be here. And I'm glad that we started with education already. So we're to teach people how to pronounce Potash. So by the end of the podcast, they will know exactly how to pronounce it. But that also tells you how little it is known, right? So if people can't really pronounce the name itself, let alone what it is used for. No, thanks a guys. Thank you for inviting me to this show. maybe we'll start with what Potash is. So Potash, or the official name is potassium. In some other languages like German, it's Kali.

So that's why you have KCL, so K standing for Kali. So look, it's basically used for fertilizer. So KCL, a chloride of potassium, it is a kind of salt that forms in the crust of the earth as many other minerals. it is used for other things as well, probably like one or two percent of potash worldwide is used in ceramics and so forth. But most of it is used as fertilizer, it's key fertilizer.

And it's been one of the probably most important fertilizers in the last several decades. And it has become a critical mineral. know, Canada started it, Canada put it on its critical minerals list first. And as you probably know, last year the U.S. did the exact same thing.

Dustin Olsen (02:34)
Very fascinating. So ⁓ as I was saying a little bit earlier, going in more to your background, so you've successfully built and exited multiple mining companies across potash, lithium, uranium. So the question is, what patterns have you learned about what makes a resource investable?

Farhad Abasov (02:51)
Yeah.

Doesn't, our approaches I would say, know, I will try to simplify, but it's a top-down approach. First we'll look at major trends that will affect certain commodities. we, know, whatever major events could be, for example, in the case of lithium in the past, we looked at what's happening with electric vehicles, with storage facilities and so forth, and how it will affect supply and demand. The same thing with uranium and of course with potash as well. So that's step number one.

So once we have a specific macro view on the commodity, again, depending on the supply-demand situation on dynamic, we zero in on a specific commodity. And then we start looking for a project in an acceptable jurisdiction. So I would say there three parts to our analysis or to our approach. One is macro view, which involves quite detailed supply-demand dynamic analysis going forward three to five years, at least. And the second one is the

project

analysis or project due diligence. And the third one, is almost as important, if not more important than the project itself, is the jurisdiction. In other words, what country it is in, what kind of operating environment we're facing, what kind of permitting situation there is, whether we can actually bring in foreign direct investment to that country and so forth. And of course, the core of all this is the project itself. So whether it's diligence on the project, we'll look at geology, we'll look at its location, we'll look at the infrastructure.

from logistics. And we look at a lot of projects, you know, on a weekly basis. And we have very strict criteria. That's why we do one or two projects at a time. Because it's very difficult to hit all these check boxes. But that's how we come down to one specific project and we take over that project. And then we take it from the very early stage all the way to the point where it's shoveled ready, meaning they're ready to go into construction. Sometimes we'll build these projects.

and start production, but in cases we actually bring to a certain point, then we sell it to larger mining companies that can actually develop them a lot better than we can.

Daniel O'Connor (04:48)
So I had a question about potash, the market, and mining and processing. It's very different, this critical mineral, than some of the rare earth elements. It's a little bit more diversified, where it's being mined. And can you talk a little bit about that? What are some of the dynamics in the market? What ⁓ are some of the factors prompting your efforts?

for the company at a macro level and then we could drill in more on that.

Farhad Abasov (05:15)
That's a great question, Daniel. I'm glad you asked it because it is a very unique sector that straddles both mining and agriculture. Because obviously, you you mine the product, but it is used for agriculture for many crops, obviously, worldwide. And what is unique about it is also its structure, meaning the supply is quite limited to probably a half a dozen countries, believe it or not. So it's geographically highly

Daniel O'Connor (05:30)
Right.

Farhad Abasov (05:41)
concentrated. Almost 70 % of it comes from Canada, Russia, and Belarus. Then we have a little bit of production coming out of other places, such as Germany and the Middle East. It's mostly Israel and Jordan. China is a substantial producer of potash domestically, but they import a lot more as well. So it is very interesting situation where half a dozen countries and about a companies produce potash, and the rest of the world imports and uses potash.

If you look at the demand side, it's also a very interesting situation. Obviously, the largest agricultural countries are the largest users of potash, but almost all of them are importers of potash, meaning they have very little domestic production. That's where we have a very unique situation where we can actually take advantage of that. I'll explain in a second why. If you look at major ag countries, and this would be China, of course, because of its population, India, Brazil,

the US and West Europe as a region, you will see that the US is almost exclusively imports its potash. Most of it comes from Canada, until recently, well, not until recently, let's put it this way. Even in 2025, despite all of the geopolitical tensions with Russia, the US still imported about a million tons of potash from Russia, believe it or not. So in other words, it's that critical. despite all the animosities and so forth, the US still

imported from Russia. Now, if you look at Brazil, the largest importer of potash, 13 million tons a year, they import almost all of it. Now, India, zero domestic production as well. Everything is imported. China, as I mentioned, has a substantial domestic production, but they still import almost 10 million tons. think about that all these countries, and of course everyone else too, I'm just talking about the largest ones, largest users of potash, are almost completely dependent on those countries.

meaning Russia, Belarus, Canada, and three or four other countries who actually produce a lot less than those three. So that is the situation that has been going on for decades. And one thing that I want to mention here, which obviously I hope that our listeners and viewers will find it interesting, even despite all these, again, geopolitical tensions between the West, collective West, and Russia slash Belarus, Canadian and Russian and Belorussian producers

do not actually bring the Padaj price down. In other words, Canadians go and sell it on an annual contract basis to China and India, for example, right on the heels of them, the Russians and the Russians come there and sell the same. So they could have easily undersold them, undercut the price, but they don't do it. So they still maintain quite a bit of discipline in the market, hence in the price of Padaj. So that brings us to a situation where a lot of these users would like to see

diversification of supply. They would like to see PADASH come up from new, what I would say geopolitical neutral jurisdiction. you know, I would say that that is a very unique situation in the PADASH sector.

Daniel O'Connor (08:40)
Well, a question on that. This is fascinating. So there's a handful of big producers and they're very different. ⁓ know, Russia, Canada, Belarus. I guess Belarus has some ties to Russia. is there any kind of questionable pricing going on or is it OPEC type stuff or is it just like

How dynamic is the market? Is it just because there's so few producers that the price is somewhat inelastic? Like what's the economic metric?

Farhad Abasov (09:09)
Well, that's…

Yes,

you hit the nail on the head. So here we have a very unique situation where Canadians, and when I say Canadians, they're basically two major producers out of Canada. Both of them are listed in New York and in Toronto. So Neutron and Mosaic. Within North America, they sell their potash separately, potash and other fertilizers. In other words, that's two distinct companies. But outside of Canada, they sell through an organization called Campotex, which is an overseas marketing arm for Canadian

potash producers. So in other words, outside of Canada, they sell as one group. So you can imagine that they obviously maintain the price as far as they're concerned. Now, Russians and Belarusians used to have exact same situation until about I think 2013, 2014. And then they had a spade and that that cartel or oligopoly fell apart. Having said that, despite that, the Russians and Belarusians still operate, I would say as one unit, but they coordinate. I'm not sure about pricing, so we don't have obviously any facts.

to talk about it, but when you look at the way they operate and also bear in mind that today, at least since 2022, since the Ukrainian war started, the Russian PODASH is almost exclusively transported through the Russian territory. So you can imagine that obviously there will be a lot more collaboration because of that as well. So those are definitely significant factors. I don't want to call them oligopolies, but there is definitely coordination among

players.

Daniel O'Connor (10:33)
Yeah, it's

not quite that, but I see what you're saying. It's suppliers that have interests that that it's not necessarily orchestrated. It's just sort of naturally aligned in some ways. And more dynamism is needed in the marketplace. And that's what you're, yeah.

Farhad Abasov (10:47)
Thanks.

Absolutely. And we

do see the price disruptions, believe it or not, in both directions. To give you the most recent examples, again, during COVID, when the supply chains across the economy, across different sectors actually have been disrupted, the potash was not an exception. So we saw the spike in potash price, which was very unusual. It spiked from $300 to about $900 per ton. It came back to a normal average price now, historical average.

Daniel O'Connor (11:07)
Yeah.

Farhad Abasov (11:18)
And in the opposite direction, the same, but as I mentioned, when the Russians and the Russians fell out, the price of Padezh came down as well. So those things happened. But generally speaking, it has been a very disciplined market as far as suppliers are concerned.

Daniel O'Connor (11:33)
And a quick question just on the processing or refining. How much goes on in that business versus, you know, it's pretty much the geological product that you're pulling out is the product, basically. I mean, how much refining happens with Potash?

Farhad Abasov (11:48)
that

I suspect Daniel, you're asking that question because you're quite well familiar with rare earths where there's a possibility of mining in one end or one location and processing in another, et cetera. So it's a little bit different in Potash, whereas basically both of mining, meaning extraction and processing, happens in the same location. So it doesn't make any economic sense to ship it somewhere else to process it further. So basically, as soon as Potash comes up, it's processed there. So almost all of the countries

Daniel O'Connor (11:54)
it

Exactly, exactly. Yes, yes.

Got it.

Farhad Abasov (12:18)
all of the companies worldwide, they sell end product. So in other words, the processing facilities, everything are pretty much in the same location, the same site as the mine itself.

Daniel O'Connor (12:29)
Got it, okay, that's very helpful. Dustin, I have a few other macro questions, but you wanna go ahead and dive in a little bit into the company and then we can go back out.

Dustin Olsen (12:38)
Yeah, so in terms of the company, when did you get started with this? And because you've been a part of other ventures as well, what really drew you to this one?

Farhad Abasov (12:48)
Yeah.

So Dustin, this project, it's called Banya Parash project in Gabon in West Africa. We had known about this project for a few years, but as I mentioned and you mentioned in the beginning, we had other projects. So we're working on another millennial, it was called Millennial Lithium. It was a lithium project in Argentina. And once we had sold that project, we started looking for a new project and we kind of revisited this project in Gabon. And the reason we like is look, twofold, one,

is the project itself and two, as I mentioned, the location or the jurisdiction, the country itself. why we like this project? Because it had already quite a bit of historical exploration data. And that's what we like about all the projects that we'll look at because we want to make sure that this project has already been explored. Someone has done quite a bit of work. So we don't want to take on a binary seed stage exploration risk of having yes or no answer. So this was one of those projects that had been explored in the past. We could actually digest all

that information, we saw quite a bit of upside potential. The second thing, the location. Now, locations, again, kind of two parts to it. One, the country, jurisdiction, very stable country, very supportive of oil and gas and mining, you know, pretty ⁓ well-defined permitting environment, know, legislative framework there. And the second thing, actually, the location of the project itself, which is right on the coast, which makes your logistics a lot easier.

So those were the main factors that attracted us. And of course, once we got involved, we started drilling and the drilling results were a lot better than what we had anticipated. that was another major thing. we kind of decided, okay, this is and the way we approach this project to minimize or to mitigate our risks, the risks go for ourselves, of course, for our shoulders. We always structure what we call earn in acquisition, meaning we don't come in and buy the project 100 % odd, right?

⁓

because then we 100 % assume all the risks, so to speak. What we do, we actually agree with the original vendor that we'll do X amount of work and if certain milestones are hit or achieved, then we'll pay them more cash and we'll issue more shares and so forth. So both sides kind of carry the risk, but if the project is good, in other words, the project actually turns out to be as strong as we had expected, then of course both sides end up making significant returns. So that way, we'll mitigate

both geological risk, of course permitting risk and so forth, and that that approach has been very successful for us.

Dustin Olsen (15:14)
And so, in what year did you start Millennial Potash?

Farhad Abasov (15:17)
So doesn't, we started looking at it in 2022. So it took us about five, six months to do our full due diligence. And then in the second quarter of 2023, we took that project into a shell. We did a reverse takeover of one of the Canadian shells and it became a listed company. And we started drilling in 2023, 2024. And the first results were amazing, were good, just to get put in context and perspective.

So we drilled two holes in 2024 and our potash horizons, potash seams were 70 meters thick. Again, to compare this to major potash deposits in Saskatchewan, in Canada or in…

in Russia, there if you get to 20-25 meter thickness you're very excited about it. It's considered extremely thick. In our case, the first two drill holes already intersected 70 meters. Now last year we drilled more and we intersected over 100 meters. So in other words, even our 70 meters went up by 40-50 percent. So again, when you look at almost any other deposit in the world, we think that ours is going to be one of the thickest. And that translates into much lower economics as

Dustin Olsen (16:26)
Awesome.

Daniel O'Connor (16:26)
Quick question on the

geology. these deposits, they're a form of a, is it phosphate or is it a potassium? And is it a sedimentary situation or is it metamorphic? How does this?

Farhad Abasov (16:35)
It's potassium, yeah, it's potassium. Potash is potassium.

Yeah.

Sedimentary, yeah, sedimentary.

So then what they are called, they're called evaporate basins. So as the name implies, so basically these were ancient seas or trapped seas, if you want to call it. And they evaporate on all kinds of salts actually build at the basin of this ⁓ ancient sea. So that's why you see almost always with KCL, which is potash, you always see salt layers as well. So always kind of intertwine

and mixed up with them, which is natural. So that's why all these evaporite basins usually have the same structure, meaning they always come with salts, sometimes with magnesium. But KCL, again, could be 10 meters thick, could be three, four meters thick, could be, in our case, 70 to 100 meters thick. And so that's how they form.

Daniel O'Connor (17:32)
And is there, just on the, to keep in the geology of it, are there purity levels? it like, you know, 100 meters, but it's dense or does it get diffused? mean, how, what, just a little bit more on the geology of these currents.

Farhad Abasov (17:46)
Yeah, yeah, no, that's a very good question.

So the way we measure this in grades. So for example, in our case, we basically measure the whole thing. So we're saying 100 meters, for example, thick potash, but we also measure grades. So in all of that material, so in our case, it's like 15, 16 % of it is potash. Now in our case, actually, all of that 100 meters is potash. But we intersect obviously a lot thicker. When we go down, it's almost 300

or so. So out of the whole potash resource, there is a great. So to give an example in our case, we've got about six billion tons just, you know, based on initial two stages of drilling of potash. Out of that six billion tons, that's in Canadian mining lingo, it's a measured, indicated, inferred resource. Measured stands for a higher confidence resource, indicated less confident and inferred even

Even less so but just to put it again kind of in layman's terms out of six billion tons 15 16 percent great means that out of six hundred six billion tons sorry 15 percent of it is pure potash so in other words that is That's the part that we can actually extract Obviously there will be some losses etc. But let's say you know basically you you know when you say great that means that's how much you can actually ⁓ recover from that

Daniel O'Connor (19:04)
Got it, got it.

And that's what you could.

Farhad Abasov (19:07)
And that

grade may vary, Daniel, just for clarity. So it may be 10%, maybe 12%, it may be in our case 15%, 16%, it can be all the way up to 30%.

Daniel O'Connor (19:18)
But just for investors, we have a lot of investors that go to rare earth exchanges. So that remaining amount, however, 600 million tons or whatever that comes out to be, that's what you can project as sales on the market in the future.

Farhad Abasov (19:30)
Almost 900 million tons.

Yeah, it's potentially

correct. Potentially. Yes, exactly. So the way the way it will work, obviously, you know, they will do quite a bit of engineering work to see how much of that 900 million tons in reality you will be able to extract because there will be losses during extraction. will be losses during processing. There will be losses during recovery and so forth. But generally speaking, you're absolutely right, Daniel. So for instance, I'll give you specific numbers. Last year and a half ago, we did what we call preliminary economic assessment. So we take

Daniel O'Connor (19:53)
Right.

Farhad Abasov (20:07)
certain production scenario, look at the costs of that in terms of capital costs and of course operating costs, et cetera. We're looking at 800,000 tons a year operation and that was on initial resource size. At the time it was much smaller, that's six billion. And we're already looking at 56 years of mine life.

So with the current resource size, we're to be looking at least 100 years of my life at much higher production rate. So these projects go on for not only decades, potentially for centuries, depending on your production rate.

Daniel O'Connor (20:40)
Fascinating. Just on economics, what does potash, I'm sure grade may have some impact on price, but what generally does, is it priced per ton? How is it priced?

Farhad Abasov (20:50)
Yeah, that's a good question, Daniel, that we should probably differentiate that the grade really doesn't affect your price. So the grade affects your operating costs, your capital costs and so forth. But the end product is pretty much the same. So the potash price currently is in a very narrow band. So it's probably between like 340 to about $307 per ton, depending on the region. So on the nearest largest market for us,

Daniel O'Connor (21:02)
CapEx, right. OK.

Farhad Abasov (21:18)
of course, is Africa itself. And it goes for about $360 and $370 per ton right now. The next nearest market for us will be Brazil, which is about $365 per ton. And the US is around $350.

Daniel O'Connor (21:32)
Got it, got it, okay. That's interesting. So basically, in the life cycle of the development stage, where are you at and how close are you to production?

Farhad Abasov (21:45)
Yes, we're right in the middle. So we just finished last year, we finished our, I would say the core exploration program, which was drilling of course.

We increased our initial resource by almost 300%, which was incredible. And it still covers only 5 % of our property. So in other words, we have explored only less than 5 % of our property. So the resource there may be humongous. But this is more than enough for us to proceed. So you will see that we'll shortly announce the start of what we call definitive feasibility study. So the feasibility study will cover all the engineering work, all kinds of tests, as well as obviously will tighten all our cost

estimates. And we expect that to be finished by the end of the year, by probably September of 2026. And while we're doing that, we're also doing environmental social studies. We'll talk about that later on if you guys want to know what exactly we're doing there. So that program should be done by the end of the year as well. And on a parallel track, we will be putting together project financing. You probably know we have US Development Finance Corporation already backing us, so they will be quite active

participant in that, they actually want to be the lead in terms of project financing. So the idea here, Daniel, is to finish all of these programs, bring it to the close, to close by the end of 2026 so that in early 2027 we can have a financial close and start construction. So we're really on the cusp of transition from exploration into the development stage.

Daniel O'Connor (23:12)
Got it, got it. And I think it's a good segue into the environmental piece for this type of mining. What type of mining is it? What kind of permitting and remediation do you have to do? And how is the community working with you and the openness and receptiveness to this endeavor?

Farhad Abasov (23:34)
Yeah, so I'll try to kind of give a good overview of how potash is extracted and why we chose this. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, and why we actually chose this particular approach. So we're using what they call solution mining method. So in a nutshell, basically you drill into your ore body, you pump water into your deposit, dissolve potash underground, you basically pump the brine back up to the surface and you process it there.

Daniel O'Connor (23:41)
Yeah, high level, high level.

Farhad Abasov (24:02)
It is probably most environmentally friendly and benign approach versus conventional underground operation where you sink a shaft, you go laterally. So it's a lot of work, a lot of costs and a huge impact on the environment. Now, if you look at potash extraction worldwide, so almost 70 % of potash today comes through conventional underground operations or production and the remaining 30 % comes through solution mining. Now, we always prefer solution mining primarily for those two reasons. A, it keeps your costs

Structure low and B. It has a minimal environmental impact We had two potash projects in the past one in Canada one in East Africa. They were both amenable to solution mining civil like solution mining frankly Our approach to potash is that if it's an underground operation won't touch it because we're looking at billions of dollars of capex You're looking at a tremendous permitting process because it has a huge impact on everything With solution mining it seems now we just started our environmental and

Daniel O'Connor (24:53)
Yeah.

Farhad Abasov (24:57)
social studies, that would, that the environmental social impact studies. And just to give you an example, you know, how we approach this thing. So a few years back in one of our potash projects, we had International Finance Corporation as an equity holder, as an investor. And one of their requirements was that we comply with IFC standards, performance standards, which are basically the highest compliance standards for environmental and social compliance. And since then, frankly,

we just stuck with them. Like for example, last lithium project IFC was not an investor, but we stuck with IFC standards because there's a gold standards. And if you basically comply with them, you know that all your due diligence, all the issues, all the permitting will be actually up to standards, even higher standards than the local standards or the particular country standards. And that's exactly what we're doing in Gabon Daniel. So if you look at,

Our approach is basically, you know, at our compliance levels are higher than what is required by Gabon's regulations. But we feel very comfortable with it because I think, you know, that way you eliminate any kind of questions, any kind of issues and so forth. Now, in terms of local engagement, again, we have very good relations with the government. The permitting jurisdiction resides at the federal level, at the central government level. So we deal mostly with the ministry directly. And of course, we have full support from the president

president's office but also we work a lot with a local population. We don't have any immediate local population because we're in the middle of you know I wouldn't say in the middle of nowhere but 50 or 60 kilometers away from people but we do engage with them all the time so that they know what's going on. We have actually quite a few people you know employed from from that community in our

on our side as well. Again, if you go back and look at our track record in all these areas, and we work in quite remote places like in Ethiopia, we're literally in the middle of nowhere. The nearest populated town was about 100 kilometers away. In Argentina, we're 5,000 meters above the sea level. But 90, 95 % of our workers or our people or our staff were all locals. So for example, in Ethiopia at some time, we had

250 people working for us, only half a dozen people were expats. The rest were all Ethiopians. The same thing in Argentina. Canada was different, obviously. All of us are Canadians, the locals were Canadians. But here in Gabon, the exact same thing. We have only two, three people who are expats. The rest are all Gabonese.

Daniel O'Connor (27:19)
It's very helpful, thank you. Dustin, any other thoughts, questions?

Dustin Olsen (27:22)
So, yeah.

Yeah, so just one last question. You talk a lot about how food security is national security. So I would love to get your take really quick on how Potash connects to the food supply and national security.

Farhad Abasov (27:41)
Yeah, Dustin, we've been talking about it for a long time, and I'm glad that, as I mentioned, both Canada and U.S. now put potash on their critical minerals list, realizing that potash, as well as some other fertilizers, of course, are directly linked to food security. And again, as I mentioned earlier, we always look at macro trends in the world that will affect certain commodities, and if you look at what's going on in the world right now, specifically economic trends, there's a lot of deglobalization, a lot of what they call

shoring, on-shoring, and so forth. So meaning that a lot of countries are looking at how to secure their own supply of certain things, be it rare earths and other critical minerals. In this case, we're talking about food. Now, before you go and kind of, you know, to war with other people and so forth, you need to feed your people. You know, I always say that, you know, why food security is national security? Look at vast majority of turmoil and, you know, civil unrest in the world. It's not because they have external conflicts.

because they have economic issues in the country.

You know, like take Venezuela way before what happened, you know, a few weeks back, that country was going down because the country's, you know, the government just mismanaged the economy. People were having serious issues with food, you know, power outages and so forth and so on. So that is the basic thing. And I think a lot of countries have come to that realization that, okay, you know, yes, I'm thinking about the rare earths, I'm thinking about that. Now, rare earths because China controls it, it's kind of, okay,

We have to make sure we control it too. But before even getting there, before you start making bullets and artillery pieces and so forth, you have to put food on the table. So that's why I think it's absolutely critical that many countries come to the realization that they have to secure the source of potash, for example, phosphate, et cetera, because that's goes into your soil. And if you look at the situation with soil quality worldwide, it's just getting more more depleted.

soil quality is getting worse and worse, so you need to actually more and more of these fertilizers applied to your soil. And again, I'm glad to see that USDAFC, US Development Finance Corporation, came in as an early backer of our project because that actually speaks volumes that the US government, for the first time, by the way, in the last 30, 40 years, maybe even longer,

that is now becoming a serious participant or actor in the mining sector. And Potash is directly linked to that food security slash national security. And we're so far we're the only company that USDFC has backed, the only Potash company I think. But going forward also we think that it's gonna be more prevalent and hopefully other governments will join the fray as well. They will come in and support the…

government and others. I think we will see that across the world. It's not just the US or Canada. If you look at Europe, that's what's happening in Europe. If you look at golf countries, the same thing, they take their food security extremely seriously. And of course, it goes without saying that China has been doing for decades. it's kind of the Western countries are a little bit late comers, but still better late than never.

Daniel O'Connor (30:45)
Can you just high level briefly describe the company so it's traded, it's publicly traded, right, in the, what stock markets just so.

Farhad Abasov (30:53)
Yes. So it is.

Yeah, so Millennial Potash is traded on Toronto Stock Exchange Venture, but we also trade over the counter in the US. We also trade over the counter in Frankfurt in Germany, but the main stock exchange is in Canada. Just to give you kind of a brief rundown of who owns what, we have very strong support from a very large agricultural family office ⁓ in Singapore, out of Singapore, another family office out of

US out of California, another big group out of the Gulf region. We have quite a few obviously funds out of Canada, of London, UK also who own the stock. The management, myself and my colleagues, we own about 20 % of the stock as well. And the stock has done quite well. So this is probably the right time for viewers to take a look. I'll put my plug in there. So the stock has been up for almost like 10x in the last 12 to 18 months, primarily because

all the drill results and then eventually USDFC came and supported us that kind of mitigated the political risk as well.

Daniel O'Connor (31:52)
Well, disclaimer, we're not here to recommend any stock, and we always recommend that people refer to their financial advisors, et cetera. But we are here to accelerate the both rare earth element and critical mineral supply chains, diversify them. In the case of rare earth outside of China, in the case of critical minerals, we happen to live in the United States. That's our home, so we want more resilience here.

We saw what happened with COVID. It's created a lot of chaos and problems. And so that's a big driver for this show and our platform. Dustin.

Farhad Abasov (32:27)
I'm you're doing it, Daniel and Dustin, because, I mean, again, as we started with this show, very few people, especially in the US, know about mining in general, as you probably know, of course. But this is the time now to bring them up to speed, and this is a time not only for the US government, but also US financial institutions, as well as…

retail investors to understand the importance. Because I think I remember, mean, I'm gonna, this is gonna sound like a little joke, but many, many years ago we had a ⁓ uranium.

company in Canada, but it was also dual listed in New York, and we had a lot of projects in the States. And I remember it was so difficult to find uranium geologists, Daniel, in the US. We had a running joke, we said that there two types of uranium geologists in the US. Either they're octogenarians or they're dead. I'm sorry to say that, but the reason for that was that the schools, decided that mining was dead. There's no need to train new geologists. There's no need to train mining

engineers and I think that's a mindset that we should really step away from. Luckily in Canada, Australia, they continued with it. In other words, they did not, but in the US, it's a high time that they realized that they should introduce a lot of these programs or reintroduce them.

Daniel O'Connor (33:28)
We're gonna, we're gonna.

Yeah.

We've been cranking out

⁓ influencers. So we're going to focus on more rudimentary, back to basics. Like mining, like engineering, that's where we need to go. So we're honored to have you and to be part of this process. What you're doing is incredibly important. Dustin.

Farhad Abasov (33:47)
Exactly.

Dustin Olsen (33:57)
Yes, likewise. And let us say for those who are listening to the show and have found it educational as much as we have, please give it a thumbs up wherever you are listening to this podcast. And if you don't miss a future show, please subscribe for hot. Thank you so much for your wealth of knowledge and educating us and our audience about potash and its massive impact on the economy. kind of that hidden impact there. So,

Farhad Abasov (33:59)
Thank you, Daniel.

Dustin Olsen (34:23)
We wish you the best of luck and hopefully sometime in the future we'll get you back on the show to get an update on where your project is at.

Farhad Abasov (34:28)
Absolutely. Thank you so much,

Dustin. Thanks a It was pleasure. And yes, I will be happy to give an update in a few months or so. Thanks a lot, guys. Take care.

Daniel O'Connor (34:33)
Likewise.

Dustin Olsen (34:38)
Absolutely. Thanks guys.