Good morning, and thank you all for joining us for this next presentation at the Southwest IDEAS Conference hosted by Three Part Advisors. Our next company is Alico, trading on NASDAQ under ALCO. And here representing the company today is John Kiernan, the Chief Executive Officer. John.
William, thank you. And thank you all for taking time to join with us today. As he mentioned, we are a 127-year ag business, all located within Florida. We trade on the NASDAQ. We have since 1972. We've been public since 1960 through the Pink Sheets. Our market cap today is about $195 million. And I'd like to tell you a little bit about the company today. No lawyers are in the room, right? All right, we'll skip. So all located within Florida, about 127 years we've been in business now. But I want to leave you with one thing today: Alico is a land company. We own about 53,700 acres of land. On top of that, sometimes on top of that, literally, we own another 48,700 acres of oil, gas, and mineral rights. Again, everything within the state of Florida.
Our main operations, how we make money, is through citrus production. So we grow oranges. We sell them to juice makers, but we grow the oranges themselves. And land management, which is going to include third-party cultivation, management of citrus groves for other people, leases for grazing, farming, and mining activities. The reason I think you're here today is we're trying to provide investors with the benefits and stability that a conventional agricultural investment represents, combined with the optionality that comes with active land management. Let's talk about what we're doing with your money on our 53,000 acres. So our largest asset is our land. Again, all located within the state of Florida. We're in 31 different locations across seven different counties. And if you've spent any time in the Free State of Florida recently, each county is kind of like a country unto itself. It's got its own government.
They have their own culture. They have their own kind of unwritten rules, and we function there because we've been around for 100 years, so we know everyone on the local level. And many of the people that work with us have worked for generations and generations. They're connected with the government officials as well, so we are a local business. We are the top citrus grower in the United States, so we're the leading supplier of oranges to Tropicana, which today is the leading brand of orange juice here in the United States. And we've been recognized on being good enough at our job that our competitors or peers will sometimes basically hire us to do their caretaking operations for them for a fee basis.
We've got about 3,300 acres that we're doing that for now, on top of the acres that we currently own and operate on our side, and the neat part about that business for us is it's completely fee-oriented. It's 100% margin because the owner of the land that hires us covers all the costs. They get the revenue, but we get a management fee, so there's no risk to us. It uses some of our basically fixed assets and our people, so it increases our capacity, so let's talk about the land itself. This is a very popular slide. We have earnings coming out next week, so we're just going to freeze everything and talk about where we were in June when we basically last reported, so at that time, our market cap was about $282 million. It's a little smaller just yet, but maybe five.
But this is management's estimates only. If we were going to basically do some of the parts for the land that we currently own, and it was basically being sold to somebody else for agricultural purposes. So think of this as almost like replacement value. What would the fair value be if we had to replace the land that we have? So we own about 5,600 acres of pasture land. That's our non-citrus land. We estimate that value is somewhere between $4,500-$5,500 per acre, which suggests somewhere between $25 million and $30 million worth of value. The citrus acres that we own, about 48,000 acres, we estimate somewhere between $8,000 and $10,000 per acre. And that's not a number that we pulled out of the air. We think that's basically a fair price for similar but not exactly the same acres that we have for the citrus operations.
That would suggest a value somewhere between $385 and $485 million, give or take, implying an enterprise value of somewhere around $400 million-$500 million. Again, our trading value is right around $280 million. So that suggests that the market is not fully valuing kind of the gap between the land value we have against kind of our ongoing operations. So where do we get some of those numbers? We looked at 2023 sales of citrus land to other citrus buyers. And it basically shows somewhere between $9,000 and $10,000, actually close to $11,000, but we're being conservative. So these are real data points for all the land that was sold in the counties that we operate in Florida last year in 2023. So again, $8,000-$10,000. I'm showing you statistics of somewhere between $9,000 and $11,000.
The areas that we own and operate, as I had shown in the map, we've got 31 different locations in seven different counties. One of the fastest growing counties is where our headquarters is in Fort Myers, Florida. And we're using third-party data to show you, I think this is from US News & World Report, that it is a good place to live. I live there myself. But more importantly, it's a growing area of Florida, and Florida is a growing state. So this is down in the south part of the land holdings that we have. In the northern part, in Polk County, we've seen in 2023, last year, it was the fifth most population-oriented growth area in the United States. So we own places throughout the state. In the north, you've got a lot of population coming through.
In the south, one of the best places to live. We think our real estate is somewhat attractive. We've been refocusing the business over the past 10 years on really what's essential and what is strategic. We had made a decision back in 2017 that a 69,000-acre cattle ranch was no longer strategic to our citrus operations. It was located in a very rural part of the state, and there was really no development path or anything else that we could possibly do with it other than run cattle. We were realizing that we were losing money doing cattle. Cattle was a money-losing operation for us. Strategically, we deemed that non-core, and we embarked on an endeavor to sell the land opportunistically. Since 2018, we've liquidated that asset from our portfolio in 26 different transactions for a total price of about $226 million.
We've also sold a little bit of citrus, again, opportunistically. So this was citrus acres that we owned and operated that were not really punching at its weight class and performing the way we wanted to do. And a strategic buyer came in and offered us $9,000 per acre with an option to do another transaction in 2025 at the same price to basically take an underperforming grove off of our books and realize cash and cash flow that helps the rest of the operation. I will point out that a year ago, so in December of 2023, the last part of that ranch was sold. We sold it to the state of Florida for conservation purposes. That was about 17,230 acres. And we realized about $77.6 million on that transaction. That was a very nice windfall for the company.
So what have we been doing with all this money over the past 10 years? Well, for the most part, we've been working the balance sheet, and we've been returning it to you, the shareholders. So since 2015, we've returned almost $197 million in capital, including $95 million since the beginning of our fiscal year, which begins in October 1st. In about $95 million of that, we've done that in the traditional ways. We've paid dividends every year since we've been public, with the exception of two quarters in the 1970s during the oil embargo where everybody got spooked. But we've been a constant common dividend payer. We did have a much higher dividend that we had basically juiced up until a few years ago, but a hurricane came through and disrupted the business, and the board wanted to be a lot more conservative about that.
We've done active buybacks in the past through the 10b5-1 program. We've run tender offers in the past and but most importantly, we've been de-levering the balance sheet so we've been prepaying debt voluntarily to basically reduce our debt level from a couple hundred down to a more manageable $80. And that's what that looks like. We set out to do about a 60% reduction. In 2015, you see, how did you get $200 million? We had consolidated two of our largest competitors into the public company that Alico has been since 1960, and we took on a lot of acquisition debt to do that, spun off some other assets, and we're very pleased with the portfolio of land, but there was a cost associated with that.
Through aggressive cash flow management and discipline, we've been able to not only decrease the level of debt, but also the terms have actually improved, and what do I mean by that? You see that little bar in 2024, $70 million of our term debt is now non-amortizing. It's bullet debt. It's either going to roll over into something or it's going to get repaid in 2029, and the rate is down to 3.85% on that. So we pay interest on that, as anybody should. But we no longer have the debt service requirement that soaks up some of our operating cash flow every year. So we're very pleased with that change and improvement. Again, we're a land company, but our bread and butter, how we pay our bills right now is through our citrus operation. I want to make very clear, we are not in the juice business.
We're connected to the juice business. We're at the far end, the bottom of the stack on the supply chain. We are the grower. We're the farmers. We have a lot of trees. We've got really great people on our land, and we grow the oranges every year, and we sell them to the processors. The processor we primarily sell to is Tropicana, the number one brand. It pays us a premium. We typically do that on multi-year contracts where they have an obligation to basically take whatever fruit comes off an acre of land, and we spell all those acres out in advance, and we have a pre-negotiated price of what we're going to get for that.
So the pressure on us is to grow the best fruit possible to satisfy them, but more importantly, to produce the greatest volume of fruit because we already know what the price is going to be. Tropicana has the hard part, right? They have to bottle it. They have to advertise it. They process it. They homogenize it. They bring in other juice from Brazil and Mexico. They put it all together, and then they distribute it. And they have it on your breakfast table every single day of the year. We harvest our fruit once. So orange trees are a permanent crop, and they can last anywhere from 15 to 50 or 60 years. We've got some that are 50 or 60 years old. And they basically produce fruit throughout the year, but you only harvest it on one day.
So someone had asked, "Well, when a hurricane comes through, can't you just, like, you know, get another crop a few weeks later?" These aren't like tomato plants or hemp or anything like that. This really is somewhat of a patient enterprise. It takes a long time. It takes daily care. It's a semi-tropical environment down in Florida. So there's a lot of weather patterns, a lot of humidity. And we're growing everything in sand. As a peninsula that's been underwater for a millennium, you know, we need the fertilizer and chemical and treat our crops every day to basically keep them healthy and strong. And that requires labor. That requires costs. And that requires a lot of discipline and attention. And we think we're very, very good at that. So good that we actually see improvement in the acres that we have.
We haven't really expanded the number of acres. What we've done is we've increased the density of trees. And what do I mean by that? We planted more trees. So picture your backyard, and you have, I don't know, 10 oak trees in the backyard. We put another 50 in there for you. So you'd have a lot more oak trees. And since each oak tree basically gives you acorns, if you were in the acorn business, we'd be making more money for you. We produce oranges. Every orange tree is an orange factory. So what we've done is by planting more trees on the land that we have owned the entire time, we're increasing the potential output that's going to lead to more revenue. And we've done that literally since 2017 by putting trees everywhere that we possibly could. And those trees are reaching maturity now.
We're optimistic that they're going to produce fruit that we're going to be able to monetize to the tune of about 2.2 million trees, actually, which is a lot of trees. Right now, if I had to guess, we own somewhere between 5 and 5.5 million. Everyone asks, "Are we going to keep that pace going?" No, we pretty much have saturated at this point the density that we can possibly do on the acres that we currently own. We are trying to grow a little bit of our operations through some of these third-party relationships where some of our competition knows they can't economically compete in the environment anymore, and they know that our economies of scale is a great competitive advantage for Alico. They partner with us and basically have us step in and do third-party caretaking for them and just pay us a fee.
So you see here, we've got a nice graph. Basically, we're showing the trees per producing acre that are expanding as those trees are maturing that we planted. And you see basically the graph on the other side showing the trees as they're maturing, and it's basically stepping up.
Back to that slide.
Sure.
What's the maximum for trees per acre that you can see?
Somewhere between 160 and 180 trees per acre is typically the max.
Okay. What do you probably do about that?
Depending on the location that we have, again, we have 30 different spots, about 160-180 trees per acre. We're not being skimpy with capital, but we think we've done the hard work now. You typically are going to lose 2%-3% a year in attrition in a normal agricultural operation. If we are replanting going forward, it's most likely to cover attrition.
If you follow the industry over the last couple of decades, this sounds like it's really easy from what I've been describing. There's a disease that's been crippling the citrus industry through no fault of anyone's. It came in from Asia. It's been around for 1,000 years, but it came from Asia somewhere in the late 1990s. Around 2000-2004, it really took hold. It's a little bacteria. It basically is spread by little, little tiny psyllid that fly around and chew on citrus leaves. Love the citrus leaves. That infects the tree and basically gets into the structure of the tree where the tree's ability to absorb carbohydrates is compromised, which means that the tree can't basically feed itself, and the trees starve and they die. We've got a fatal disease that's affecting the industry and has been for over the past 25 years.
So why are we talking to you today? Well, there's been a couple caretaking practices that have kind of mitigated some of the damage from this disease. And there's been a couple treatments that have come on board over the last couple of years that have taken a huge step forward. But if you should go home and pull production data for the state, year 2000, the state of Florida probably did close to 250 million boxes of fruit on 800,000 acres. Not bad. Last year or even this year, the state of Florida is forecasting 15 million boxes of fruit post-hurricane on most likely 200,000 acres. So you've seen a tremendous contraction because a lot of our smaller competitors are unable to compete in this economic environment because their production has basically been shrinking. How do we do this?
As we said, greening basically compromises the tree's ability to absorb food. So what we do is we feed it smaller quantities more frequently. So you still use the same nutrition and caretaking practices, but it's much more frequent, and it's a little more hands-on. So labor costs have increased. You know, fertilizer costs have increased. Irrigation costs have increased over the last two decades. It's been more expensive to run a citrus operation.
How do you make fruit?
Basically, we've got Hydrojects that basically use liquid nutrients to go through the irrigation system and basically goes into the root structure.
The more interesting play is in 2022. It was approved for the following season by, I believe, the USDA and the FDA as well to allow injections of an antibiotic called oxytetracycline, which was used in several other kind of permanent crops like apples for a long time, but never in orange juice. They allowed it to be first used as a treatment for greening. It's relatively simple. You have like a bladder of this solution with oxytetracycline in it. Someone actually has to drill a little tiny hole. There's a valve and a tube that goes into the hole that you just drilled into the tree. Pressure will actually force the liquid into the trunk itself. And then once that basically is completed, you remove the tube. When we first started it, the application cost, the labor cost all in was somewhere around $3 per tree. Oof.
If I've got 5 million trees, that's $15 million. That seems a little crazy. Through some creativity, but people actually do the work. And again, economies of scale and a generic actually came on the market very, very soon after this was approved. We have that cost down to somewhere between $0.50 and $0.75 per tree. And why are we doing this? Because like a flu shot, this makes the tree healthier for a season. It allows it to basically get a little bit more normal, but more importantly, the fruit itself in the research trials that were done basically improved somewhere between 20% and 50% on the volume of fruit, fruit stayed on the tree longer, and the quality of fruit was improved. So the first year, I think we had done, hang on a second. It's all running in my head. Let's say 2 million basically trees.
The state of Florida, through a grant program, actually subsidized all those costs for us. So the first year was free. Second year, we doubled. We did close to 4.5 million trees. And again, same subsidy was out there. So they covered about half of the cost. It's difficult for me to say with 100% certainty that this is basically working exactly the way it's supposed to work because in 2022, a hurricane came through, Hurricane Ian, and basically affected every single tree that we had with very significant wind forces. Most of the acres we had were affected by 150 plus mile-per-hour winds for somewhere between 6 and 12 hours. And if you stood outside for 6-12 hours, 150 mile-per-hour winds, you'd probably be in a bad mood. The trees are still not back to where we want them to be. They weren't killed. They weren't fallen over.
They didn't break. They're just stressed. I thought they made that up, but that is a scientific word in the agriculture community that the trees are still a little stressed. This will be year number three for us. We start harvesting in two weeks. We are cautiously optimistic that we're approaching more normal levels of production, but I can't make any promises, and I definitely can't give you a forecast. But that's what we're all hoping for, is the oxytetracycline is doing what it's supposed to do, and our crops are going to revert to more normal levels of production. In light of all that, what we've discussed up to this point is our agriculture operations underlying, or perhaps on top, is we have been evaluating every acre of land that Alico owns for its highest and best use.
That seemingly generic philosophy is what's going to make the most money for our shareholders in the long and mid and near term. Right now, the answer is blatantly clear. It is citrus. That's why our citrus operations continue. But in the event that citrus doesn't perform the way that we need it to do, there is some good real estate potential. We're going to get into more specificities in early 2025. But our number one property that we're in the process of entitling, and entitling in Florida is a code word for rezoning. Basically, it's converting the zoning from agriculture, as it's been for 100 years, and basically getting permission to zone it into something like residential or commercial development.
We have a 4,500-acre citrus grove that's very active today that's at an intersection between two major roads and is at the end of a corridor that's already been developed over the last decade or two, so active agriculture in a development zone, and two years ago, we started this process. This most likely is going to be a town or it'll be two villages. It's going to have thousands and thousands and thousands of homes. I expect it's probably going to be some sort of master plan community. It'll be built to standard code, so it's going to be hurricane-proof, and potentially, it's going to provide jobs, commercial opportunities, and a lot more homes between Naples, Fort Myers, and a city called Immokalee. This is in a Collier County area, so Collier is actually where Naples, Florida is based. Fort Myers is actually on the Lee County side.
A lot more development's been on Lee. So this is one of the first kind of bigger communities that's being contemplated on the Collier side. But to facilitate this, we went all in and brought in-house expert Mitch Hutchcraft on board in May of this year. Mitch has been doing the entitlement process for Southwest Florida properties for big companies like King Ranch and Celebration and a few others over the last 40 years. So Mitch is the best at what he does. And in addition to working on this property, he's helping us evaluate the other 30 properties that we own so that we can make sure that highest and best use is reflected in our strategy every single day. ESG. This looks like a very serious ESG crowd. We're filing our sustainability report for the fourth time, I believe, tomorrow.
We do sustainability because it's the right thing to do, and it's been part of our DNA for the last 100 years. We get absolutely zero credit, which is hysterical, for the 5.5 million trees that we own, which are the best carbon capture tool you can get in the world according to the ESG community. We get zero credit. We literally get a zero for that because we use that in our day-to-day operations. So if I should sell that to Mike and he basically comes and buys 5 million trees for me, he's going to get major carbon capture credits, and he can basically monetize those. And I get a lease payment, and I can do something else, and I can still use his trees. Be a win-win for everybody.
I can't actually do that today, but the fact that I own 5.5 million trees and take care of them like it's my bread and butter and get no credit from the community is beyond frustrating. That's not why we do what we do. We do what we do because it's the right thing to do. And clearly, we're here to basically be stewards of the land that we've been owning for the last 127 years. So you can read more about the report when it's released tomorrow. I'll give you a hint. It's going to look really similar to what we did last year. But we've gotten good marks on that side. We just really get lousy scores. And oh, by the way, I mentioned we're basically using chemicals and fertilizer to grow trees in sand. When you stop that, the trees die.
If you don't use fertilizer, you die. The ESG guys really don't like using nitrates or phosphates or any fertilizer. So our business is not 100% compatible with the ESG movement, but we're not here for the ESG movement. We're here to make money for the shareholders. So how do we do that? Really, we focus on the bottom line. So in the past five years, we've done about $244 million of EBITDA. That's going to include some land sales. We just renegotiated a supply contract with Tropicana this past May for the next three years. That's 30%-50% higher than what we had last year. Our production potential is looking like it's trending the right way, and we put a lot of assets in the ground, and those bets should pay off as those trees are maturing. Remember, we're talking about a fixed expense base.
We have to take care of 54,000 acres every day. As you get additional revenues on top of that, that's pure margin that goes to the bottom line. And we have ample liquidity. I think I mentioned I have $95 million of credit lines that basically MetLife had renewed. Rabo had been our primary banker before that, and we had to renew every two years. Met said enough is enough. They gave us a credit line, slightly better terms for 10 years, no negotiation, 10 years. So our liquidity is looking pretty good. We have sell-side coverage with Roth. We've got, I think, 70% institutional ownership at this point. There are one or two comps which we can talk about in a quiet time that are probably two to four times higher than ours. We're an orphan stock. We've never done a capital markets transaction on Wall Street.
Nobody really loves us. But we do like to evangelize our story. So we'll take any meeting, any time, and we'll tell you who we are and what we do. And when we have the fourth or fifth meeting over our next couple of years, you're going to say, "Yeah, you delivered everything that you had promised." That's the credibility that we're trying to make, and those are the relationships we're trying to live up to. We discussed our real estate strategy where we developed a track record over the last seven years. We proved that we can be disciplined and patient on our ability to recognize opportunistic sales. We are still citrus operators, so don't read anything into this.
But in the event that we decide we're not going to be citrus operators, we have 54,000 acres of land in Florida and a track record of basically opportunistically selling at the right times. Maybe there's some value that could be realized at that point. As an industry leader, we do have economies of scale. We do have a presence. We typically get best contract terms. We're the most favored nation when it comes to dealing with Tropicana with all of our peers. But we respect that. We've got people on the Florida Department of Citrus. We take our civic responsibilities very seriously. We are stalwarts in the community, and we think that we're stewards for the land. That doesn't mean that we've forgotten our roots. We've returned more than $197 million of capital since 2015. 2015 is when I joined, so that's kind of the starting point for me.
We've done that across the board on different ways that we can return capital to shareholders. And most importantly, if you're looking towards the future, we've put our money where our mouth is. We put more than 2.2 million trees back in the ground. We're taking care of them with every treatment we possibly can because we're here to try to make as much money for you, the shareholder, as we possibly could do. So with that, I'll stop and see if anybody's got any questions. Yes, sir.
On the Fort Myers, 4,500 acres. So how long is this re-entitling of the rezoning process taken? And then are you going to develop the lots and sell them to home builders type thing? Or what will be the strategy?
So every project has its own life. We've been at it for two years.
We're going to go public with the details and start the formal application process with the Collier County Commission probably February. We're going before the board on December 10th, and we're going to sketch it out and basically get them to put us on an agenda to get serious. We've been having preliminary conversations for the last year, but that ultimately could get us approval to proceed at the county level by this time next year. That's one. Now, I've got federal and state agencies that I have to worry about as well. You guys don't have this problem, but we have these panthers that run around that everybody loves until they come and eat your dog. But environmentally protected species in Collier County is a really, really big deal.
We've taken some very aggressive proactive steps to provide protection for them, which we think will go over very well. We still have to go through the 404 approval process, which they're still writing the law on how to do that. There's a couple of really big guys in front of us, and we're going to let them take all the punches, and we're going to step in right behind them in their slipstream and hopefully go through much faster. Some of those guys have been at it for a decade or more. We think we can still get through this in the next two to four years, if I had to guess. Second question is, assuming two to four years from now, basically I get the stamp of approval, I'm ready to go. We reserve the right to basically call an audible at that point.
We're taking steps to plan everything, but we have seen historically home developers or developers will tap you on the shoulder and say they're smarter than you are and basically buy you out, in which case they take the asset now that it's fully entitled and pay you the slice- spread rate for basically the assets that you have. That's one. Two would be some smaller guys typically will tap you on the shoulder and say, "I know what I'm doing. You did a great job entitling. We'll take it from here, but we'll partner." So when they sell a house, you'll get a piece of the action. So over the next 20 years, you're going to make this much money, but it's going to take you 20 years to realize that. Interesting. The third basically is we bring in-house capabilities to get into the home development and construction business.
I don't really think I want to do that from my first crack at that, but if this takes four or five years and there's some consolidation in the industry, we've seen some peers, particularly in the panhandle, that have been very successful at that. But that probably is not our top priority. So between one and two, interesting. Three in the long term makes a lot of sense if we're going to convert into a pure diversified real estate company and we're not in agricultural operations anymore. But for now, the trick is really getting through the door. So we have to get the approval process at the federal, state, and local levels complete. Sir, do you have a question?
Yeah. I guess you guys put the enterprise value pretty quickly up at the front, and I imagine a lot of people are looking at that. When you talk about citrus being the best investment at the moment, I think it's kind of hard right now given the hurricanes and the greening to understand what is the actual cash flow generation potential of the assets. Maybe just thinking as to why operating them for cash is better than we have to smart $5,000-$9,000 an acre.
Sure. You only sell land once. So the trick is if the land can produce income year after year after year, you kind of want to hold on to it and produce the income year after year after year because then when you sell it, you can take the money and do something else into another asset that'll produce income year after year after year. You'll see back in 2019, the same acres that I owned produced on the bottom $48 million worth of EBITDA.
That's just our citrus operation EBITDA. That's not land sales built into all that. No insurance, no handouts from the government, nothing. Basically, five years ago, we were looking at an operation that did almost $50 million. We've had a lot of volatility in our cash flow related to weather. The joke is I've seen three of the last 100-year storms, and I've only been here 10 years. I can't tell you climate change is a real thing or not a real thing, but I'll tell you I'm getting really tired of hurricanes because the curse word in Florida is crop looks good. You ask anybody how it's going, crop looks really good. At the end of the season, if you don't have record revenues, it doesn't matter what it looked like. I care about what I can monetize.
If we can monetize the assets and generate cash flow, holding the land makes the most sense. When we can no longer do that, there's nobody who's going to pivot faster than a week ago.
Yes, ma'am.
During your 100 plus years of operation, this isn't the first.
I've only been there 10.
Yeah. But this isn't the first time you've dealt with a widespread disease. So is something like this OTC treatment a cost that you see continuing for the foreseeable future, or are you looking for alternatives like genetic modifications or anything like that?
So our customers are terrified of GMO, right? They're terrified of certain fertilizers, particularly the stuff that winds up in Europe. So we have to be very, very sensitive to just spreading it out and hitting anything that moves. Prior treatments for disease were Middle Ages oriented. So there's a disease there still is.
It's a disease called canker, and canker basically was a leaf infection, and it would kill the tree, and it was very, very contagious, so the way they treated canker, canker, kind of the same, they basically rip all the trees out and burn them, so if your grove is affected, kill it, replant the trees, come back in five years, and you'd have new trees, and someone had asked a question about what the maximum density is. The reason we needed to fill in all these trees was because canker was so spread out, so when they replanted, you could basically play football in between the trees at that point because they didn't want the leaves touching each other. Otherwise, they would infect. Because this disease is spread by a bug, it doesn't matter if they're close to each other.
It's going to get infected one way or the other. So the short answer is we'll look at anything. The economies of scale are driving down this price, but if it's not going to pay for itself, we'll find another alternative treatment. We're very active with the research department at the University of Florida, which is leading the charge on this for the last 20 years. The Brazilians now have a massive infection rate for their citrus crop, and they're four or five times larger than Florida is. So all their resources, we're all moving in the same direction. So ultimately, I'm sure there will be a cure. We just make sure it's a viable economic industry that is paying everybody's bills by the time that happens.
William's giving me the eagle eye here that I am out of time, but I want to thank you all, and I'm available for questions anytime. Earnings the Monday after Thanksgiving, and we can talk if you want to do one-on-ones after that. Have a good day.