...Thank you all for coming out. I'm Dave Mossberg at Three Part. This next company is a really good example of kind of how we find companies to present at this conference. Investor who owns the stock, very smart investor, I have a lot of respect for, brought this one to my attention, and we bought them. I think they came last year, maybe for the first time. No? New York, first time. Yeah, so just in June. So, that's a big way that we. That is the primary way we get companies to come, is based on suggestions of money managers and I personally own the stock, so hopefully that's a good thing, and I'm gonna turn it over to John to give the presentation.
Dave, thank you, and thank you all for being here today. My name is John Kiernan. I'm the CEO of a public company, trades on the NASDAQ called Alico, A-L-C-O. Market cap right now is about $220 million. Enterprise value is about $300 million. We own about 50,000 acres of citrus groves in Florida. We grow oranges. We sell these oranges to Tropicana, and they make the juice, but we are not in the juice business. We are just the landowners who basically grow the oranges. I want to talk a little bit about how we do that. So our primary operations, as I mentioned, are citrus.
Citrus is a business that has seen some ups and downs through a disease called greening over the last twenty-five years, and we've taken some positive steps to address some of those concerns. We planted more than 2.5 million trees over the last several years, which increases our density. We've adopted a technology called oxytetracycline trunk injections, which basically is injecting an antibiotic directly into the tree itself. And that's approved by the U.S. FDA. It's also approved locally in Florida, and it is working. So we've seen some positive impacts in a controlled environment that'll show improvement on our production year- over- year.
That has not materially been reflected in our financials the last couple of years because we are susceptible to some weather patterns, and in two thousand and twenty-two, Hurricane Ian hit southwestern Florida and really hit the citrus industry and companies like Alico. So the industry for two seasons basically got hit pretty hard. Production did not recover after the first season, so last season was a bit of a disappointment. We do have some confidence that the third season, which we will start harvesting around Thanksgiving of this year, will show some material growth and some positive improvement. So we ask you to all kind of stick around and see how that goes.
The reason we're here today, though, is Alico is not only a citrus company, but we seek to provide our investors with the benefits and stability of the agricultural operations, with the upside and the optionality that comes with active land management. Some of the sizzle in our story over the past couple of years is, in addition to our day-to-day agricultural operations in citrus, we've been active in what's called the entitlement process, which is a code word in Florida for rezoning, to convert agricultural land in some of our properties to something that's better suited for something else, and the something else is code for residential or commercial development. I'll talk in a little bit.
We've got a 4,500-acre citrus grove that we've owned for generations that is outside of Naples, Florida, that is currently in the middle of the entitlement process, and we brought some experts in from the outside to help accelerate that timetable, that when it is fully entitled, could be worth a lot of money for us. We're still conducting citrus operations in the meantime, but we're using that as an example of how we're able to evolve the company beyond what we've been doing for 125 years into the future, and the future in Florida, for want of a better word, is probably development, so if your takeaway today is that these are the guys who grow the oranges, absolutely, positively true. That's how we make our money today, but what Alico really is, is we are a land company.
Our land of 49,000 acres, 48,000, because I just sold some, but it's located in 31 different locations across seven different counties, all within the center of the state. So if you see here, you've got Tampa up in the corner. Going across, you got Orlando, it's going to be up here a little bit. We're in the center of the state, so the rural areas and the part that I was just describing, which is outside of Naples, is this little yellow part right here. That's a 4,500-acre parcel that's currently being entitled. That's gonna be the future of the company, guys. We're gonna grow citrus as best we can.
We're gonna make money in citrus for as long as we can, but eventually, whether it's a generation from now or 50 years from now, more than likely, this is gonna have a lot more blacktop than ordinarily, and my job as the CEO is to do this in an organized, disciplined fashion, to monetize this land for its highest and best use, because as any real estate company will tell you, you get to sell land once, and we have a little bit of a track record. Over the last seven years, we had some non-strategic assets that Alico owned, which was a 69,000-acre cattle ranch, had nothing to do with citrus, and we came in and basically opportunistically, sold it in smaller parcels, not outright, and we tripled the value from where the first sale was until the last private sale.
That discipline will be applied to everything that we currently own going forward, while we continue to run our day-to-day operations, so we are not getting out of citrus, but as citrus basically becomes smaller and smaller, through the disease of greening or people are just drinking less orange juice, and the pressure of the valuation of highest and best use being gone for commercial or residential gets greater and greater. We think that Alico is going to be in a fantastic position to take advantage of that, and that's really why we're here talking to you today, because we do not think that's properly reflected in the value of the stock, so just as an agricultural snapshot, this has nothing to do with what I just mentioned, is highest and best use for being something other than agriculture.
If I looked at the 5,600 acres of ranch land that I still own, somewhere between $4,500 and $5,500 per acre, that implies $25-$30 million potentially of value. These are management's estimates only. The 48,000 acres of citrus land that I own, ballpark, somewhere between $8,000 and $10,000, if I was going to sell that ranch land to another farmer. So this is not selling to the Trump Organization to build hotels. This really is going to be a competitor that wants to do something like citrus or watermelons or things like that, somewhere between $8,000 and $10,000 per acre, which implies a value somewhere between $385 million and $480 million. Add them all up, that implies an enterprise value of somewhere between $400 million and $500 million.
Current enterprise right now is less than $300 million. So we believe that we are intrinsically mispriced in the market, and that creates an opportunity for investors like you, that have some patience, to jump in early and watch us basically put the points on the board for you over time. And we've been in the game for a little bit on this entitlement process, because God willing, in December, I'd like to put up another page that looks like this, about what the highest and best use potentially could be.
We have not done that previously because there's not a lot of good public comps, but we're working behind the scenes over the next couple of months so that when we release our annual earnings in November, December of this year, I will try to put out a better forecast to say potentially what these land values might be if they went into commercial or residential realtor's hands. So stay tuned for that. It's probably going to be a little higher than what you see on this page here. Where did I get the eight to ten? I looked at citrus sales. This is from a third-party source. A good real estate firm did a survey in two thousand and twenty-three, so this was last year. Again, these were just sold to other citrus operators.
Land sold somewhere between nine and 10 and 11 thousand dollars an acre. So I haircut back, our prices basically going to, you know, the 8 to 10. So I'm trying to be a little bit conservative here. We talked a little bit about, the 4,500 acres that is down in that corner outside of Naples. Fort Myers is actually the story. It's close to Fort Myers. It's within 10 miles of, Fort Myers proper. But, U.S. News & World Report basically had reported that it's one of the fastest-growing places in the United States. Same thing with other areas that we own.
Basically, Polk County, where I have, I think, fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen different groves, which is the big concentration of parcels outside of the Tampa map that I had shown you, is the fifth best population movement back in 2023 as well. So we own good assets in the right locations, and real estate is all really about location. So let's talk a little bit about what we're doing day to day. So this is a snapshot. We put this out publicly so you can go back and check it. But we not only sold the ranch land and the prices increased, but it actually helped support some of our operating businesses. So the last parcel of the Alico Ranch was sold around Christmas of last year, and we realized about $77 million in that sale.
Nearly all of it was gain, so we saw a lot of that basically hit our income statement, so that's going to be in our GAAP earnings, but we don't have that luxury of having these non-core assets available, so this really creates a little bit of focus on our day-to-day operations in citrus, so we have a much more critical eye going forward on where citrus is going to be, which is why we've made so many investments over the years, and selectively, we started to look at some of the groves that may have been underperforming.
And the best example I can give you of that is, just a few months ago, we sold about 800 acres of one of our groves for about $9,000 per acre, to a gentleman who's going to be a peanut farmer, because we had determined that the highest and best use was only going to be for agriculture. So we were not making a lot of money on that grove, and it couldn't be done, any better by us, and someone else, was gonna basically come in, and the only other opportunity would be for agriculture based on that location. We wanted to realize top dollar, and that's a good example of us being able to deliver that. Historically, we've been returning capital. We've been doing that, through basically debt repayments as well as returning it directly to shareholders.
We've done that through dividends. We've done that through basically some tender offers, and we've done that through buybacks. We haven't done buybacks most recently because we haven't had a lot of kind of, you know, discretionary cash flow based on some hurricane damage the last few years. But, since 2015, when I joined the company, we've given back almost $200 million to our equity and our debt holders. And we think that goes a long way towards the credibility of we are aligned with shareholders. We see what shareholders basically value, which is return, and we're disciplined on making sure that we live up to that expectation every single day. So from a debt perspective, Alico came together in 2013. We've been a public company since 1960.
Again, remember, we have been around for about a hundred and twenty-five years, so they went public in the Pink Sheets, had never really done any stock transactions. The stock traded the way it kinda always does in the Pink Sheets without a lot of fanfare, but the family that really owned the business decided in, basically 2010 s, that they wanted to get out of the business, and they ran a sale process that failed. Some hedge fund money from New York put together an investment pool, took over half the business, and within, I think, six months, basically acquired a number of competitors and rolled them up to create the Alico footprint that we have here today.
I was brought in in two thousand and fifteen to bring some operational and executive leadership to the team, and have really focused on integrating all those different piece parts into a lean kind of corporate operation, which is where we are today. As part of those acquisitions, they took on about $200 million worth of debt. And I'm proud to say that following some of the non-strategic sales that I had actually led, we've got our debt down to about $85 million, which is completely manageable. $70 million of that is now non-amortizing, so we only do interest-only payments on that, and that most likely will roll over based on our relationship with the lender in 2029 .
Worst-case scenario is we can sell some land and pay it off if we had to, but we think 50,000 acres against $70 million worth of non-amortizing debt is a pretty good deal, especially since it's sub 4% debt, and we think that's very competitive. So we've done a good job of delevering and de-risking the balance sheet. Again, we talked about we are in the business of growing oranges. We sell to Tropicana. They're at the other end of the supply chain. But we consider ourselves partners, and Tropicana considers themselves a partner for us as well. What does that mean? When we negotiate, we negotiate for kind of the near and the midterm. I think the long term takes care of itself.
Our supply agreements in the citrus industry over the last six or seven years have really migrated more towards kind of floor and ceiling pricing, with a little bit of some inflation escalators built into that, and usually it's a zero-sum game. Somebody's gonna win and somebody's gonna lose. Alico got away from that with Tropicana about six or seven years ago. We don't do that anymore. We've entered into a supply agreement where Tropicana takes every piece of fruit that we sell on an acre of land, so the acres are actually what's contracted, and last contract we had done was back in May. It is for 65% of our acres, and it's at prices that if you looked at our average price last year, again, this was the Tropicana itself, it's about, what do we say?
33%-50% higher over the next three years. So it's a third higher than what we just got on average, and I'm gonna have more fruit because it's gonna be covering, from a production perspective, so we think, it's gonna support much higher revenue. But most importantly, we think this is a good public recognition of the strategic value that a supplier like Alico represents to a major producer of orange juice because the quality of our fruit is high. You know, they're not in the business of doing anybody a favor, but we represent a very high-quality supply, conduit for them because they need the fruit, and we're the best people to produce it.
We put our money where our mouth is, is the other takeaway here, which is, in addition to basically doing the best job every day, we've really been investing in our operations. We've been doing that by replanting trees. We own about 48,000 acres of citrus, but not every acre has trees on it. We've taken some acres that have been fallow, so the trees are dead, or when we bought them, there weren't any trees there, and we've replanted. So we now have producing acres, which we replanted, in some cases, six, seven, eight years ago, and you now see an increase. We don't think there's anyone else in the United States that can say that they can demonstrate this commitment to the citrus industry, and we think this bodes well for supporting the potential for future revenue growth.
This all comes down to our leadership. We're the only public citrus company in the United States. Limoneira actually does lemons. They don't actually do a whole bunch of oranges, so they are public as well. In the United States, the oranges that go into juice are primarily grown in Florida. I think 99% of the oranges in Florida go into the juice market. The oranges you see in your supermarket on your produce aisle, they're primarily coming from California. This is really as a proxy for juice. What we've seen is, in most recent years, some of our competitors have raised their hand and said, "We can't do this economically.
We know that you're the largest, and you've got great economies of scale, but we also think you do this a little bit better." So we've picked up another 3,300 acres from some of our peers that now pay us to basically manage their groves for them. Why is that important? One, we think it's a recognition of the leadership that we have, but more importantly, it's free money for us because they pay all the expenses, they take all the revenue risk, and basically, we just get a flat management fee per acre for what we see. So that actually is good margin business for us, if you can see that. So caretaking has the potential, but we don't forecast it. We're not looking for it, but we certainly will do it if it makes good economic sense, and we've got some extra capacity.
So we talked a little bit about citrus operations. This really comes down to the acres of land that you own, and again, we own all the assets. We're not leasing this from anybody else, so no one can take it away from us. But you'll see that we basically have seen not only are the acres coming up, but the trees per acre are increasing, and that has a lot to do with the plantings that we've made previously. And we think this really is the secret sauce between us and anybody else in the industry, is we have been replanting as the industry has been contracting. So we are extremely well positioned to capture revenue as well as market share going forward. And as you've seen, market prices go up...
The more volume you can bring to the table, the more it should actually contribute to your bottom line. So we think this is actually a good selling point for our story. We just have not been able to really demonstrate the success of this strategy over the last two years because we had that bad hurricane that happened in 2022, which we hopefully have seen the worst of. So, the best development, the one that everyone is the most excited about, relative to greening. And greening is a disease that's been around for a thousand years. It arrived on our shore coming through Miami in the late 1990s or early 2000s, and it's devastating. Greening is a fatal disease. It affects citrus trees.
It gets spread by a little, tiny bug, a psyllid, that chews on the leaves and affects the trees. The trees can't really absorb carbohydrates, so the trees starve. The way we've countered up to this point is we feed the trees more often, so they get less nutrition, but more often, so basically they can absorb it, and we keep the trees alive a lot longer. So they're more productive, and we get more fruit. Why is that important? In the last twenty years, you've seen our operating costs skyrocket. That's because our labor and our nutrition, basically inputs have increased because we have to do much more work to basically tread water and come up to the same spot.
In 2021, at the end of the year, the U.S. government actually allowed, on a trial basis, the citrus industry to inject into tree trunks themselves oxytetracycline, which is an antibiotic. Which sounds super, super scary that you're gonna put antibiotics into your food supply. It is kind of super scary. So how do you do it most safely? The efficacy period is basically for a year, so it'll last about a year. You'll see the benefits for a year, but it is not visible after, I think, 90 days of making the application. So you put it into the tree trunk, you can detect it within the first 90 days. 91 days, you can't find anything.
We, as an industry, and the FDA have said, "Okay, double that." So the rule is you can't harvest fruit within six months, 180 days. So it's like double protection that this antibiotic is never gonna come anywhere near being detectable into your food supply. So it's a good thing. We're being super, super, super safe, and over the first year that we actually did this, no contamination. Everybody played by the rules, no issues whatsoever. We did see some material improvements in the quality and some material improvement in the ability of the fruit to stay on the tree a little bit longer, which is great. The problem is, it was a smaller base because the hurricane had actually affected these trees the first year that we actually had done this, so we didn't have a lot that we can measure.
We came back and doubled the amount of applications that we had done, this past season, and we'll see the fruits of that application coming up, starting in Thanksgiving of this year, so hopefully I'll be back here next year and be able to tell you materially, you know, what that translated into dollars and cents, but everybody says, "Is this really a good use of your resources? Does this give you some money?" Well, the answer is yeah, because it's infinitely scalable, because the state of Florida actually paid for us to make these treatments, so we got grant money from the state to actually basically make these applications, and this is a labor-intensive business. This isn't something where you can fly an airplane and just spray leaves.
This literally is, you need one person to basically drill a hole into a tree, which is really, really tiny. Another person comes in and basically injects a little hose into the tree, and then another person's gonna hook the hose up to a bottle, which has pressure in it that's gonna basically get absorbed into the tree over 15, 20, 30 minutes. Someone else has to come by and take, you know, the bottle away, and someone else has to come and basically refill. So there's a whole assembly line mindset that goes into how we basically do this, but it's labor-intensive. When we started the process of doing oxytetracycline treatments, it was about $3 per tree, which is not economic. Within the first month, a generic hit the market. So again, this was off a brand label when it started.
Within a month, a generic came in, which really lowered the ingredient price, but we figured out from an assembly line perspective at Alico, since we had millions of trees to take care of, how to do this most efficiently. We got this down to $0.70 per tree. I won't tell you we made money doing the application. I will tell you that the benefits we got from doing oxytetracycline were net positive, and I need to turn that into what does that look like on a graph for you next season? Because hopefully, this season's gonna have a lot more fruit to talk through, so oxytetracycline works, it's economic, and we think it actually is gonna make a big difference going forward. We talked a little bit about that yellow box. Remember I had shown the graph, that basically had the map on it?
This really is our real estate portfolio, and we talked about Corkscrew is the name of the grove out of Naples. Corkscrew, 'cause it's on Corkscrew Road, which goes like that as you go across the beach. This is... If you wanna talk, we can talk about this for days. And if you are in the Southwest Florida area and you'd like to take a tour, contact me, and as investors or prospective investors, we're happy to take you around. But it is ideally located for development. It is a very, very good location for kinda higher-end development, and we've got the best professionals working on it. So we think this is a three to five-year process remaining.
We've got someone that we recruited back in May, who's done this work for 35 years, and he is now the head of real estate for Alico. So we put our money where our mouth is, that real estate is the future. It has to be done efficiently, and so far, we've been moving in a nice, straight, efficient line. But we will see, you know, hopefully by December, maybe I can put some milestones out to show you the progress that we've made, and we can talk offline if you'd kinda like to see kind of what we've done up to this point, but this is one piece of our real estate portfolio. This is about 10% of our acres.
We are looking at every other piece while we're continuing to do our citrus operation, to see what the highest and best use would be. And some of those other entitlement processes are being done, but they're being done quietly off the radar. It's not even a press release because nobody cares, but they may be realized even quicker because they're in a different county. They are probably up in the Polk County, which is the northern piece. As all good companies do, we're very active in the ESG movement. We're not doing it because we're trying to satisfy BlackRock or anybody like that. We're doing it because for 125 years we've been stewards of the land in Florida.
We have not changed anything because of the ESG movement, but we've been able to put out a sustainability report for the last three years that really captures how we treat our people, how we treat all of our land, how we treat all of our resources, and how seriously we take our environmental responsibilities, and we're happy to talk about that, or I'll give you a copy of our sustainability report anytime at your convenience. So from a highlight perspective, from a financial performance, we've done about $245 million worth of EBITDA over the past five fiscal years. That includes the hurricane years. So that shows that even with some volatility, the capital gains that we've done from some of our sales have been able to actually sustain our business. We have been self-sustaining as an operating company.
You've seen some pricing improving through some of those contracts that I just mentioned with Tropicana, and you're seeing the production potentially increase because of the trees we put in the ground, as well as the oxytetracycline hopefully coming to work, and our expense base, because it's acre driven, we have to take care of 48,000 citrus acres. We have to take care of them every day. That's not really a variable cost. We do the same work, irrelevant to where the revenue is coming out. It's kind of stable and it's pretty much fixed, and we have not seen tremendous inflationary pressures over the last several years either, so what you see over the last couple of years is probably what you can forecast out going forward.
Most importantly, we've got ample liquidity that can ride through any of the volatility that we've seen in the hurricane markets. What does that mean? I've got $95 million worth of untapped lines of credit from very good banks at competitive rates that we save for a rainy day, because when it rains in Florida, nobody cares. When a hurricane comes to Florida, everybody gets really excited. That'll cover two years of operating expenses if, God forbid, we don't sell a single piece of fruit, and that will sustain us as we go forward. In the capital markets, we are covered by Roth Capital, Gerry Sweeney. We have about 70% float. We've got very strong institutional ownership, but clearly, our trading multiples are lower than some of our public peers.
Our strategy, as I mentioned, is we've kind of gotten out of everything that's non-core at this point. We've invested in our real estate assets, and our assets would be people. So we're continuing to see the company basically move down that trajectory while we're executing day-to-day as an agricultural operations. Tropicana speaks to our leadership within the ag space. We still have the same management team, the same board, the same laser focus on being aligned with shareholders, and the $197 million we've basically returned to debt and shareholders is gonna be a lot more shareholder-weighted going forward as we get discretionary cash flow, because we are not going to repay that $70 million of non-revolving debt. Last, we're investing for growth. So we will see where we come out over the next season.
We'll hopefully be able to make a little bit more of a forecast as we get through this season. I don't want to jinx it, but we haven't seen a hurricane hit us in two years, and we're halfway through the two thousand and twenty-four season, so knock wood. We'll get through the next one, and we can just focus on delivering you the results that you right, we just-- right we are entitled to. So I'll stop there and see if anybody's got questions. Question, sir?
What's the situation on the availability of labor that other Florida employers have a headache? That's true for Alico.
It has not been true for Alico. The question is, what is our risk of not being able to field a labor force? So Alico has about 200 employees that are full-time. They're all Florida residents. They've been with us, some of them for 40 or 50 years. And they know every acre of land because we don't move people around. They live around there, they do their thing. We supplement that with somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 laborers that we bring in offshore through contractors. So this is part of the H-2A visa program. These guys are probably coming from Mexico, most likely. And we've never had a problem because we use six or seven contractors, and they'll come work for us.
We pay very good wages, and then they will go up the coast and work other agricultural operations. So we're kind of like a core part of their H-2A program. And honestly, you know, we're paying prevailing wage. We treat our people very, very well. It's a very kind of intense process. So, they know it's steady work. And again, I've been here ten years. We've never had a labor problem whatsoever, so we're feeling pretty good about that. Sir?
Talk about the citrus land value and technology. Can you talk about what the cash yields on the underpin that value in terms of growing citrus on the northwest corner?
The short answer is no, I can't. Simply because as a public company, I'm really the only comp. We've got all of our financial information that's out there. You can see what our citrus operations have produced over the last several years. You know, I think we've done $88 million of citrus-related EBITDA over the last five or six years, right? You've got the volatility that comes across from that. All of our peers are private, so I can't really speak to that. All that I can look at is kind of trading values, which would be comparable sales, and that's why I gave you the chart in there of all the citrus sales prices over the last year, and that's why I kind of feel comfortable backing up that $8,000-$10,000 number.
I can't give you a yield or a cap rate. Sir?
You said Hurricane Ian impacted your production for two years. Is that normal for other impacted years?
So we got spoiled. The question is, Hurricane Ian impacted us for two years. Is that unusual? Right. Historically, it's been two to three years over the last fifty years, give or take, is what I'm told anecdotally. Two thousand and seventeen, when Hurricane Irma hit, it was devastating, and we bounced back within one year. So I got all spoiled and kept my fingers crossed that that would be what we would see going forward. We did not see that the second year, so it was an unpleasant surprise that things were reverting back to more of the mean. And I can't give you one single instance of why, but it wasn't just us, it was the entire state. So you saw underperformance and slower growth.
They still had 30% increase from where it was in 2022 from a production perspective, but it was still disappointing because it was such a low starting point.
You mentioned the oxytetracycline. Does the use of that make these products not eligible for labeled organic or other aspects that may be of value to consumers?
So the question is, if you use oxytetracycline, the OTC injection that we had mentioned, does that preclude us from being marketed as any sort of organic product? And the short answer is no, because we're never gonna be marketed as organic, 'cause we use fertilizer and chemicals to treat. If you've been to southwestern Florida and you come out and you see us, you'll realize that I'm growing 5.5 million trees in sand. That's not a joke. The soil is really sandy in southwestern Florida because it used to be under water, you know, millions of years ago. You have to use fertilizer. You have to use chemicals. You're also in a subtropical climate, so there are crazy winds and humidity and all sorts of things. You need help.
Organic is probably gonna be done in a greenhouse. You'll see that in much, much smaller quantities, and you'll pay $25 or $30 per gallon if you want an orange juice that way, and my family's not doing that. Probably have time for one or two more questions. All right, we're here all day. We're also very transparent, so please give me a call, or send me an email, and we can do follow-up conversations, or you can come down to Florida and take a tour. Thank you very much for your attention today.