All right. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the 10:00 A.M. session of the SIDOTI Micro-Cap Conference. My name is Andrew DeAngelis, newly minted research manager here at the firm. Today, I'm very pleased to be joined by John Kiernan, CEO, and Lydia Gavner, Chief of Staff of Alico, ticker ALCO. Really unique asset in the public markets, and, you know, on a personal note, you know, I'm interested to learn a little bit more about the supply chain of my favorite breakfast beverage. During the approximate 30-minute session to follow, the company will review slides from their corporate presentation, and then we will open the floor to a period of question and answers. The questions can be directed to the company via the Q&A tab at the bottom of your meeting window.
Without further ado, let me turn the proceedings over to to John and the company.
Andrew, thank you. Thank you so much. We're delighted to be back here with SIDOTI. My name is John Kiernan. I'm the President and CEO, and I'm very proud to be part of Alico, which, as Andrew mentioned, is a NASDAQ-listed company. Been around for about 125 years. We trade under the ticker ALCO. We've got a market cap of about $200 million, give or take. We have been in business, as I said, for about 125 years. We grow oranges, and we've done billions and billions of these over the last several years, which we sell to Tropicana, and they make juice. So we've got a relatively simple business, but certainly a much more interesting story than just that.
So, I'll ask Lydia to flip the page, and we'll get some disclosure language out of the way, and I will jump in. So Alico is a land company. We own about 54,500 acres of land, all located within the state of Florida. On top of that, we also own 49,500 acres of mineral rights, throughout Florida as well. Some of that overlaps with the land that we have, some of it doesn't. And we make our money through citrus production, as I mentioned, by growing oranges, but we also do it through third-party land management. And we also can do leases for cattle grazing, for other types of farming with third parties, for vegetables or fruit, and certain mining operations as well.
The takeaway that I need you to remember is that Alico wants to provide investors like you with the benefits and stability of a conventional agricultural investment, combined with the optionality that comes with active land management. So we've got a farming business, but the true value of the company is the underlying value of the land, all located in the state of Florida. If you've been following headlines for the last several years, you realize that Florida real estate is becoming more valuable by the day. Our footprint is primarily in the center of the state. If you go from Tampa East, you'll see we start to get some yellow dots there.
We've got about 49,000 acres of citrus groves, all located in about 31 specific locations, but if you broke those locations into distinct properties, it's probably closer to 47 specific properties. But in those major locations, we're in seven different counties. That makes us one of the largest landowners in the state of Florida, and it definitely makes us the top citrus grower in the United States. As I mentioned, we grow the oranges, and we sell them to an orange juice producer, in this case, Tropicana. And Tropicana is important because they're the number one brand in the U.S. So we are the principal supplier to the number one brand of orange juice, which makes Andrew very happy, 'cause that's his favorite breakfast beverage.
We've got exceptional caretaking practices, and the reason I can say that with a straight face is we've had competitors come to us and contract for us to do basically their operations, which we call third-party caretaking, and pay us a management fee for our services. So they reimburse us dollar for dollar for every cost. The oranges grow, they sell the oranges, and we get a management fee throughout the year, which is fixed per acre, to basically pay us. So it's pure margin business for us, but it's a tribute and recognition to our expertise that we've got neighbors and competitors that are having us do traditionally what they've done for themselves. So as a land company, we get asked often, "Well, what is your land really worth?" As I mentioned, you know, our trading value, we got creamed in the market yesterday following earnings.
But when we did this, it was about a $300 million enterprise value at the end of the March quarter. That was about $220 million of equity and about $80 million worth of debt. And we took a look from a management perspective and said, "We break our portfolio of acres out today, we've got about 5,600 acres of non-citrus land." That would be some cattle pasture and so on and so forth. We estimate that's somewhere between $4,500-$5,500 per acre. That suggests it's worth somewhere between $25 million-$30 million. Combine that with a management estimate of what potentially our citrus would be at market if we were selling only to another citrus buyer or another agriculture buyer. This isn't a potential management estimate.
If we were gonna take our agriculture property and flip it to a housing developer, that's a totally different conversation. If we were just gonna sell to another agricultural provider, probably somewhere between $8,000-$10,000 an acre, and that's somewhere between, let's say, $400 million-$500 million. Add those together, that implies an enterprise value of somewhere between $415 million-$520 million , again, against the $300 million enterprise value at the end of last quarter. How real is that $8,000-$10,000 per acre? Well, in our earnings announcement yesterday, we announced that we disposed of one of our underperforming groves partially, and we sold that to a third party who's gonna use it for another form of agricultural investment.
I think they're gonna do peanut farming, and that was for $9,000 an acre, which is between eight and 10. So, we think those are real values. Again, only to fellow agricultural parties, not real estate or commercial developers, and it does suggest that we potentially are trading below what kind of market value would be for some of these assets. Part of my job as CEO is to get out and communicate, and see if I can close that valuation gap. So if we were gonna transition beyond citrus and take a look at potentially, what just grove values would be, and we were selling only for citrus groves, again, this would support kind of that $8,000-$10,000 range as well. These are the total amount of reported citrus sales last calendar year.
It was reported by a reputable real estate firm called Saunders Ralston, and they published a Lay of the Land Report that comes out. You can get it online. A total of about 15,700 acres was sold last year, which is down from the prior year, which was 17,000 acres, but the average price was around $9,000. It was about $8,600 the year before. Again, well within the range that we had basically described to you on the previous page. Okay. So everybody, if you've been following the headlines, knows there's some significant population migration during the COVID years. That has continued. The last statistic that I had seen was reported, Florida's seeing an influx of about 900 people a day coming into our fair state, which is a great state if you'd like to come visit.
But we wanted to know where all these people were deciding to live. And rather than just kind of forecast random news snippets, we took a look at U.S. Census data that looked at 2023 numbers from last summer, and it looked at the top 10 counties in the United States. And lo and behold, number five, Polk County, is an area where we've got dozens of grove space, and that turned into the 5th largest population movement in the entire country last year. And Alico owns a whole bunch of groves in Polk County. So, have we been active in other kind of non-citrus real estate? The answer is yes. We started selling land in 2017 for some non-core property that we owned, that we used as a cattle ranch, and it had been around for multiple generations.
We determined it was non-core to our citrus business, which was really our true operating business, and we opportunistically sold that without brokers, really, on our side. We did cooperate with with brokers from the buyer's perspective, but we sold about 69,000 acres in about 25 different transactions for a sum total of about $226 million. The last sale that we recognized was a big chunk of that, which was close to 17,230 acres, which we sold to the state of Florida right before Christmas last winter, for about $77 million. When I add it all up, we had sold in cumulative, about 40,000 acres to the state of Florida, and these were at increasing price points. The state of Florida obviously valued the land.
I think they're using it for kind of open space and, on behalf of the citizens, for wildlife preserve areas or for, some recreational areas with state parks and such. And lo and behold, you know, they put very good money on the table, and Alico is grateful for that because we used those proceeds to help retool our balance sheet. Returning substantial capital has been part of our DNA over at least the last 10 years or so. I've been with the company for nine years, and we've done a really good job of figuring out how to take operating cash flow, and other forms of cash flow, like some of those land sales, and basically help restructure the balance sheet and return it to shareholders.
So we've repaid debt or shareholders with about $996 million since the beginning of 2015. The reason that is important is we've done about $94 million since 2021. We've done that in the form of dividends. We've repaid almost $120 million of debt. We've done a major buyback program, where we did almost $10 million of buybacks, and we did about a $25 million tender offer, about seven years ago. So we clearly put our money where our mouth is when we say we really respect the returns that shareholders demand, and if we can't make investments on your behalf as a shareholder, we have a track record of returning that capital to you.
From a de-levering perspective, we grew the company back in 2013 and 2014 by a handful of acquisitions of similar-sized businesses to create Alico as it stands today. 15,000 acres of citrus grew up to about 50,000 acres of citrus through these combinations, and it was necessary to basically take on acquisition debt to do that. We had about $200+ million in 2015 of acquisition debt. As I mentioned, we rolled that down to about $70 million of acquisition debt today, but our total debt balance is about $85 million at the end of last quarter.
So we've done a really, really good job of bringing that debt balance back to not a management level, it's always been manageable, but we think a very non-controversial debt level against 54,500 acres of land in Florida. All of which is generating an operating cash flow return for shareholders. So Andrew was talking about kind of his favorite breakfast drink. We need to reiterate, we're not in the juice business. We sell to the juice guys. We're in the orange business, so we're at the far end of the supply chain. We grow the oranges, we sell it to Tropicana, but you know, our other customers in the past have been Florida's Natural Growers or Simply, which is part of Coca-Cola, Minute Maid as well, and basically they distribute it.
They sell it to the retailers, which are the supermarkets or the kiosks at convenience stores, and they're the ones who put it on your breakfast shelves. So it's a relatively streamlined process, but we are at the far end of the supply chain well before you get to the consumer side of this. So, you know, we've talked about returning $196 million by paying off debt and returning it to shareholders. It hasn't just been about basically, you know, disposing of assets and returning capital. You know, we have seen our acres that actually produce fruit increase a little bit because we've been buying acres a little at a time, but more importantly, because we've been replanting fallow acres with new trees.
So truly, we're increasing our production capacity within the footprint that you, as the shareholders, currently own, and we think we're the only people in the state that have actually been able to accomplish this track record in the last five years, and we think that this chart represents that. And what do those kind of trees look like? Well, you know, we've put about 2.2 million trees, new trees in the ground. It takes about five years to get to kind of full maturity, and we'll get to that in a second. But, you know, our caretaking practice is as lean and as efficient as possible. We know that we've got the best economies of scale. We certainly have the strongest buying power, so we're able to offer the best economic solution for any of our neighbors.
And I'd mentioned that the vote of confidence was, we've got 3,300 acres that came on in the last year from competitors that are no longer competitors, they're now partners, that outsource their caretaking activities to us, and on behalf of them, we earn a management fee. We'll continue to pursue those relationships as we have capacity to do so, and it's basically a pure revenue stream that's purely profitable and generates cash flow for us, so we like that. So from a tree perspective, putting all those new trees in the ground, you'll see kind of how this chart recommends that we are poised for future productivity growth. You know, we're increasing the density of the groves themselves. This is an average grove density, went from about 140 trees per acre, now close to 160 trees per acre, so that is substantial.
But most importantly, you're also seeing the producing acres for Alico increase from about 31,000 acres to about 36,000 acres, which is huge, and obviously, that's gonna include some of the grove acres that we're taking for that third party as well. On the far side, you're seeing a mix. It's the first time we've disclosed this. How many trees do we own? You know, it takes a long time to count 5.5 million trees, but it's probably about 5.5 million trees at this point. And you're seeing that orange line get bigger because we made significant investments in 2016, 2017, 2018, that are now maturing. We've made the same investments in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021. Those are basically coming up on the maturity scale as well. So we will see the green shrink.
We will continue to replant for attrition, which is probably 3% of our kind of total tree population, but really focus on redeploying capital into where we can get better returns. So it's probably less in the infrastructure and trees, and maybe more into some of our other real estate-related activities. So, OTC is a new phenomenon. We have been injecting oxytetracycline, which is basically an antibiotic solution, into tree trunks of the trees that are infected with a greening disease since January of 2023. This past season was the first harvest season. We were actually able to measure the benefits that this OTC application generated. We were pleased against the control groups to notice that the quantity of fruit increased, so we got more fruit, so it was basically bigger fruit.
We did not notice a substantial amount of improvement in the quality. We're hopeful that we'll see that, combined with continued improvements in size next season, because this will be an annual treatment itself. This is very, very safe. Basically, the noticeable period, the detection period, is probably about 90 days from when you inject into a tree until it's untraceable in the fruit itself a nd we, within the state of Florida, under FDA guidelines, have increased the duration period of the safe zone to 180 days. So it's a six-month window from when you inject until when you harvest to be doubly sure that this antibiotic will not show up into anybody's food supply.
So we wanna make sure everybody appreciates that this is a necessary treatment, but poses no risk at all to the consumer and is undetectable because you're not gonna see it. Helps us, it's not gonna hurt anybody else. On the real estate side, we are continuing to conduct all of our citrus operations, but thinking towards the long term, as we've seen our production basically slow down, and in some cases, go negative in some of our groves. We've seen some negative growth in some of our groves from our production since the hurricane hit in 2022.
We're looking towards the long term of what the highest and best use potentially could be for some of the acres that we have, and would they be better suited in the long term for potentially residential, commercial, or other types of real estate activities? The first property that we identified is outside of Naples, Fort Myers, and Lehigh Acres in Immokalee, Florida. It's on a road called Corkscrew Road, and it borders Route 82, if you want to pull it up on our interactive map on our website.
But we've started the entitlement process with that, less than a year ago, by assembling a local team of experts, of lawyers, engineers, consultants, surveyors, and so on, to really identify what the highest and best use for this property could be in the long term if we turned it into some villages or towns, while we are continuing to do the citrus operations there. We'll stop citrus once we get that off the ground, but it's gonna take many years before we get there. At the same time, behind the scenes, we're looking at all of the properties that we own and will determine their highest and best use, and most likely, some of what we own will continue to always be agriculture.
Some of what we own most likely would be better suited for commercial and residential purposes, and some of what we own will be to be determined over the next decade or so. So we've got a, kind of a broad portfolio that we'll get to, and we're continuing to evaluate that with in-house and external experts. ESG, a little bit of a hot button, but we've been the stewards of our land for 125 years. We take our responsibility to the environment, to the community, to our employees, extremely seriously. We file sustainability reports, which we created because we wanted to for the past three years. They're certainly on record, they're on our website, but it does not drive our business. We don't spend substantial cash doing this. It's part of our DNA and what we do.
Happy to answer substantial questions about that if anybody's got anything they'd like to ask. So last but not least, why invest in us? Well, over the last five years, we've done about $244 million worth of EBITDA. We're renewing some supply contracts that'll be substantially higher than what we have today. We've been putting a lot more trees in the ground, which basically increases the level of production that we expect going forward, and that's against a fixed expense base, so that should contribute to much higher margins. We've got $95 million of untapped credit liquidity through working capital and revolvers with Rabo and with MetLife. So we've got a very, very, very solid balance sheet. On the capital market side, you know, we do sell-side research through Roth Capital. Gerry Sweeney is the analyst who covers us.
We're about 70% institutionally owned, and if you follow some of our peers, we're probably half the multiples that they are. So we think we're a relatively thinly traded stock that we think is cheap. We've got a track record on the real estate side, where we've sold about 59,000 acres at increasing price points over the last five years with the Alico Ranch. That was about $226 million. We will continue to opportunistically pursue other strategic sales, but we're gonna do it on our timetable, and we are not in a rush to sell our land. We do have about 49,000 acres of other mineral rights.
We can monetize those at our convenience, and we are in the middle, actively, of the entitlement process for all the appropriate properties in the priority order that makes the most sense for shareholders. We enjoy a very strong strategic relationship with Tropicana. We think it's a partnership, and it's multi-year with them, and as I said, we're gonna be renegotiating, and we'll hopefully have something to announce in a couple of weeks. Back in the bottom side of this, $196 million of capital return to debt and shareholders since 2015. We've been investing in those trees, which is obviously putting our money where our mouth is for long-term growth. We also pilot other programs.
We're still looking to see anything that can give us the operating cash flow performance that citrus does, whether it's Pongamia or bamboo or hemp or anything like that. Right now, citrus is the best game for us to play. And we talked a lot about our third-party caretaking, and we're automating a lot of our back office systems, but we're finding automated solutions for some of our caretaking out in the field as well. We've been in business for about 125 years. We're committed for generations to come, and we look forward to working with you. We try to be as transparent with shareholders as possible. If we can't answer questions today and you're not on the schedule, reach out to Lydia or the investorrelations@alicoinc.com email address, and we'll see if we can get a meeting on the books for you.
Andrew, we'll turn it over to you and see if you've got any questions for us?
Great, John, thank you for the prepared remarks. Wonderful run-through of the story. Let me just start off things. We do have some questions coming in from the audience, but you mentioned that you reported earnings on Monday. Could you just take us through any of the notable takeaways from that release that, you know, people should bear in mind?
I mean, we, we don't want to deviate from anything that we publicly said. There's transcripts on record. You know, we talked about, kind of our OTC success. We talked about being disappointed with the current harvest season, which was 10%+ higher than what it was in the previous year, but clearly had not recovered fully from the hurricane. And we basically laid out the case of why we're optimistic to see continued recovery into the next season. We talked a little bit about our liquidity strength, and basically, the progress that we've made kind of on the entitlement side, on the real estate, and our commitment to citrus in the near and midterm, and the potential for kind of, success on the real estate side with commercial and residential as we evaluate highest and best use going forward.
Thank you. Can you talk a little bit about your supply relationships, you know, customer concentration risk? Any notable risks there in terms of, you know, customer concentration, your dealings with, you know, just a handful or one customer? And do your customers have a say in terms of how you use the land going forward?
Very interesting question. So we are primarily concentrated with one customer currently, and that's Tropicana. Tropicana is the dominant brand. We've been very happy to function as a strategic partner. We believe that their ownership group is supportive of a long-term relationships with us as a key supplier. We are very comfortable with kind of their stability and financial strength, and we think we enjoy a very strong partnership-oriented relationship with their management team day to day. No reservations about working with Tropicana at all. We get asked the MBA-oriented question of how crazy are we that we're going to concentrate all of our sales with a single party? Our bad debt, I think, was $5,000 over the last 10 years. We've never really had any bad debt at all with any of the majors.
That came from, I think, some fruit sales that we had made to, smaller third parties, and I think they went out of business before the end. That was not Tropicana. So from a risk perspective, we think there's virtually no risk at all of being concentrated with the single party right now, and we've been very, very pleased with that relationship and hopefully, fingers crossed, years to come.
Great. Could you walk us through the import landscape for citrus? Has this been an increasing factor, you know, over the last several years, and do you plan for that to change going forward? Is that impacting the outlook for your sales at all going forward?
So, as I mentioned, we grow these, and we have sold every single orange that meets quality standards since I've been here. There's no issue at all for selling anything. We do these on long-term supply agreements, so there's contracted pricing. The supply of fruit in Florida has been insufficient to meet the demand from consumers, so that our processing friends at Coke and Pepsi, which is Simply and Tropicana, are not able to meet with our domestic supplies. So I believe they've been importing juice to basically complement the oranges that they can get within the state, since about 2017, when the first big storm hit us, which was Hurricane Irma. You know, I think that probably is going to continue based on the volume of fruit that's being grown in the state right now.
But it does not compromise our ability to sell anything, and it certainly has not impacted market pricing. Market pricing has only increased in the last several years because there's a scarcity right now.
Speaking of pricing, any rough parameters around the pricing that you hope to achieve in your contract negotiations with that large customer you referenced earlier?
No, but we believe it will be substantially higher than where we are today.
And then maybe let's move over to the land side of the business. You're involved in kind of actively managing your land value to maximize, you know, the value of the company going forward. How are you thinking about the long-term split between, you know, agricultural production and these other type of uses, for your landholdings?
Well, I think we've been relatively clear about a strategy that will identify the highest and best use for every acre of land that we have. We haven't publicly disclosed kind of the state of that analysis, but, you know, if, if pressed, we know that we're gonna have many, many acres and many, many groves that are only best suited for agricultural purposes. There's gonna be many, many groves that are probably best suited immediately for alternative uses, which could be residential or commercial development. And then there's gonna be many, many groves stuck in the middle, which is potentially agricultural in the near to midterm, and probably long term, highest and best use is gonna be something other than agriculture. So we're evaluating all those.
We're prioritizing all of those decisions, and when we're in a position that we can disclose that, we will present that strategy to the market with a time frame, a roadmap, a budget, and a cost structure, as well as the upside potential, with, God willing, some comparables that you can calculate out and see kind of what that potential land value might be to shareholders.
Great. Over time, so, that concludes today's session with Alico here. From all of us at SIDOTI, we'd like to thank everyone here for their participation, and hope you have a productive next couple of days here at the conference. Take care, everyone.
Thank you, Andrew.