We were just waiting a few minutes. I know it's the first meeting of the day, so just letting people come on in. But I think it's safe to get started. So thanks for joining us today, everybody. I'm Pooran Sharma. I'm the Food and Agribusiness Equity Research Analyst at Stephens. It's my pleasure to welcome you to today's Fireside Chat with The Andersons. For those of you that are not familiar with the company, The Andersons is the leading ag supply chain company in North America, with operations spanning across grain, merchandising/storage, renewables, and nutrients. The company has scale as the sixth largest grain handler in North America. And with me from the company today is Bill Krueger, the CEO, and Brian Valentine, the CFO.
Now, to help us learn more about the company and its key drivers, let me turn it over to them to provide a more detailed background on ANDE's operations and strategy.
Thank you, Pooran. This is Bill Krueger, President and CEO of The Andersons. Always good to be back in Nashville and looking forward to a good conference. So The Andersons is broken into three different reporting segments. First is our Trade segment, which has around 300 million bushels of total elevator capacity, which puts us in the top five total in the U.S. We have the ability to trade from our producers all the way to the end users, and we leverage the different regions that we trade in quite actively. As a total, the company will trade approximately 40 million metric tons of grain and grain products annually. We also have a Renewables group, which is comprised of four ethanol plants, a renewable diesel feedstock business, and then merchandising of the various commodities around the ethanol plants, such as ethanol, DDGS, and corn oil.
We're very focused in this area in looking at our low CI development at all four of our plants. We'll talk about that a little bit more later, and then our third area of focus is our Nutrient and Industrial group, which has a primary focus in agriculture with a wholesale, farm centers, Specialty Liquids, and a lawn and turf manufacturing. Finally, our strategy that we're focused on, and we'll talk quite a bit about here this morning, is really staying close to our core, and we've had the opportunity to do a couple of nice-sized transactions in the fourth quarter, which we'll talk about, but with our balance sheet in a very strong position, we're looking at taking the opportunities that we're able to develop and kind of continue to grow in that core area.
Yeah, and I guess just to add a little bit of color, we have the company has been around more than 75 years. We have about 180 locations across North America and a few outside, about a little north of 2,500 employees. And our EBITDA the last few years has just been a little bit north of $400 million. To kind of frame that into context where Bill was, if you kind of think of it at a macro level, we're kind of 35%-40% trade, 40% renewables, and call it 20% nutrient. That's kind of the big picture macro frame.
Right. Well, appreciate that background. Maybe we could kind of start off a little bit bigger picture and dive into the details. I'd like to start off by talking about the Andersons' approach to growth. I mean, you've been able to make several improvements to your business that positioned you to be more nimble throughout different points of the ag cycle. And I mean, you've been active on the M&A front, as you've mentioned, to augment the growth profile of the company. Could you maybe just speak more to these dynamics and help us understand more?
Sure. Yeah, I can start out, and then Bill certainly could add some color. So our growth pipeline has really been pretty active over the past several years. We have kind of what I would call a traditional stage gate process, not anything overly scientific, but where we run projects through a pretty disciplined or very disciplined process. I would say over the past couple of years, we've probably looked at north of 70 or 80 opportunities, but most of them, we just really, for a variety of reasons, couldn't make the economics work, or as Bill said, they weren't necessarily close to our core and the right strategic fit. More recently, though, we are seeing more opportunities.
I think in a higher interest rate environment and with some of the things shifting a little bit in the economy, we're seeing valuations come more in line with where we think they should be, and we're seeing a bit of a shift in opportunities. Recently, we announced an investment in Skyland Grain, LLC. That's a really good opportunity to expand our footprint into Southwest Kansas and also the panhandle of Texas and Oklahoma. This is an area where we've traditionally done a lot of point-to-point trading and merchandising but did not have a meaningful asset footprint, so I guess in a way, you could think of it as somewhat analogous, albeit on a smaller scale, to the Lansing transaction, where it's very complementary from that standpoint. It's going to give us access to a farmer network of more than 7,000 farmer producers, which is great.
We want to continue to develop and strengthen those grower relationships. It also, from the agronomy perspective, will essentially double the size of our farm center footprint. Today, we have about a dozen farm centers in Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. This will be complementary to that, building out that footprint in that region. On the other side of that, we also announced from an organic growth perspective, we recently announced that we're making an investment in the Port of Houston lease facility. That's going to be about a probably $70 million project, orders of magnitude will be hopefully up and running by early 2026, and really will be a nice opportunity to export soybean meal out of the Port of Houston. As Bill mentioned, on the renewable side of the business, our focus really has been on lowering the carbon intensity of our plants.
We have four ethanol plants that we operate in a joint venture with Marathon. Three of them are in the east, and then one that is in Denison, Iowa. And as we continue to think about opportunities in that space, we want to continue the focus on larger scale plants, so plants that produce more than 100 million gallons a year, that are well located from both a corn drop perspective as well as some of the freight and logistics, and also that are well positioned for carbon sequestration. And so if we think of our eastern plants today, they are well located from a geological standpoint, where in all likelihood, you could go downhole and sequester carbon. And then our plant that's in Iowa is located, you could not go downhole there, but it's located very close to the Summit pipeline if that comes to fruition.
But I would say on the whole, and Bill mentioned this a moment ago, it's really about those things that are close to our core, places where we really feel like we have the right to win and an opportunity to have a competitive advantage. I don't know, Bill, if there's any other color you wanted to add.
Yeah. The one thing I would add is kind of emphasize what Brian had mentioned is we have been deploying capital between Skyland and Houston in the fourth quarter is over $150 million. And that's come, as your question talked about, in regards to how we're handling M&A is continuing to stay disciplined. And these two projects fit our core along with giving us the opportunity to grow in a few markets that we think have a lot of opportunity.
I appreciate that. Just kind of maybe if we could shift over to and focus on trade now. Given where ag markets are at now versus where they were at just kind of a few years back, what gives you confidence that this business is well positioned relative to kind of the rest of the industry?
Yeah. A few things, too. If you compare us just to the industry, we have a lot of confidence in our assets, our people, and the geographic locations that we're in. We've been able to continue to grow the company. And today versus 2019, we're really triple the size. And a lot of that has come through acquisition, and some of it has come through just organic growth inside the company. And our merchants understand the regions that they merchandise in. Our ethanol plants are a natural consumer of the corn that we trade. And when we talk about renewables, we'll hit on what competitive advantages we think that we have there. But in general, the geographic diversity that we have today across the 300 million bushels of elevator capacity that we have is really the entire U.S. and Ontario.
So with that geographic diversity and understanding of the market, I think that we're positioned very well. We've created regenerative ag programs for producers and our end users, which will total over 250,000 acres in 2025. And that's just delivering value to both our former customers and our CPG consumers that we service throughout the course of the year.
Appreciate that. And can we maybe talk about the different dynamics that make this business successful? I believe a higher price and higher volatility environment is better for this business. But if you could just provide us color, we'd appreciate that.
Sure. As we've stated several times, the higher volatility and a higher priced environment generally provides our merchandising teams more opportunities. And the higher volatility and higher price generally comes from lower supply and higher demand driving an inverted market. So there's always opportunity to find both geographic and calendar opportunities to trade around. In an environment like we're in in 2024, it's been very interesting to see the diversification deliver results. We've talked about that over the last several years. And 2024 has really been the first year that we've seen lower commodity prices with carries. And the results continue to be above expectations. And that's a result also of us being willing to pare back our assets that were maybe inefficient or not located in the best regions over the last five years.
So what we're left with is a group of assets that we feel like are well positioned.
Yeah, and I think there's a really important point in there that Bill just brought up, and you've heard us talk about this before. One of the things we've talked about the past several years is that the combination of the Andersons and Lansing really creates a really complementary footprint in business that should be positioned to perform in either market dynamic. So you're absolutely correct. In general, things that are good for the farmer are going to be good for the Andersons. And higher prices, higher volatility is going to create more opportunities for arbitrage, more trading and merchandising opportunities. But we're seeing it in this market environment. When carries come back into the market, that is where you get this nice balance between the asset footprint and the point-to-point cross-country trading and merchandising.
And it's nice to see the business generating that consistent cash flow in either market environment. And I think that's proving out one of the things that was part of the original theory with the combination of the companies.
One of the reasons you guys are a nimble company. Maybe if we could kind of just shift over to, I know you mentioned Skyland already complements kind of the panhandle and Oklahoma area. But can you just talk about how this fits overall into your growth strategy?
Sure. So for those of you who may not be familiar with the exact geographic region, really think about Amarillo, Texas, up to Dodge City, Kansas. And that oval, in that area, we have 47 elevators that we acquired, 10 farm centers with approximately 100 million bushels of elevator capacity. And where we see the value, and it's quite a number of different opportunities that we see. But in that region, it's one of the fastest growing regions in the U.S. for feed demand. Whether it's beef, dairy, pork, they're all growing in that region. And so there's only so much corn that's going to get produced because of the climate. If it's not irrigated, the dry land doesn't produce. And with the growth, it has become one of the areas in the U.S. that's actually an importer of corn from other geographic regions.
And we've been trading in that region for the past 20 years with no assets. So this opportunity really gives us a foothold. With the acquisition came two shuttle loaders and unloaders. So we're able to really service our customers. As Brian mentioned earlier, there's over 7,000 producers that Skyland services. We think that the opportunity starting with the fertilizer, with fall applications, spring applications, all the way through planting, our risk management tools, our Freedom products that we use with the other 26,000 farmers around the U.S., we feel like that's going to be an opportunity for the farmers. And then just being able to find them the best market for their grain throughout the course of the year. And it is a region that still grows a fair amount of hard wheat. So that gives us an opportunity for our exports out of Houston for the wheat.
And then another area that we've really focused on in this region is importing feed ingredients also. There's a lot of DDGS, canola meal that's going into that region that we can, cotton seed that we can participate in also.
Anything on agronomy?
Yeah. On the agronomy, thank you. On the agronomy side, we feel like our Specialty Liquids business, where we produce specialty liquid or liquid fertilizers, we think that there's an opportunity to really grow that business in that region. Traditionally, they haven't used as much Specialty Liquids in their agronomy programs. We view that as an opportunity. If you think about adding, doubling the size of our farm centers, it doubles the size of the total volume that we're able to handle, which will allow us some pricing power that we can pass back to the producers.
Great. Maybe if we could shift over to renewables now. Can you talk maybe about industry margins and what drove kind of that strength for the majority of the year that we saw in 2024?
Yeah. I can start out, and then certainly Bill could add some color. I think one of the biggest impacts that we've been seeing this year from a margin perspective has been lower corn basis values, particularly in the east. Year-over-year, for example, in the third quarter, corn basis levels were $0.80 lower than they were the previous year. And I think this speaks to one of the things where it kind of speaks to the complementary nature of our trade business and our renewables business. As Bill mentioned earlier, our teams originate the corn into the plants. And so those are markets and areas, dry areas that our teams have a lot of knowledge about. And then they also certainly are trading and merchandising the finished products as well on the other side.
I would say, in general, crush margins certainly through the first part of the year remained solid. They've tapered off a little bit over the, call it the September, October timeframe into November. They've been up, but they're up and down on a regular basis. But another driving factor this year has also been exports. Last year, the industry saw about 1.4 billion gallons exported. And this year, we think it's going to be closer to 1.9, even getting up toward 2 billion gallons with a lot of that going to Canada. I don't know, Bill, if you want to touch on incremental blend rates and things like that as well.
Yeah. In addition, Brian kind of hit on the two key attributes for margins as corn basis and exports. But we have continued to see blend rates increase. And one number that we talk about a lot is for every 0.1% growth in the blend rate is an additional 120 million gallons of ethanol consumption, which is in essence an entire plant. And yes, we have seen capacity increase. And we'll probably talk about that a little bit later. So the overall economics for ethanol, both domestically and internationally, have been very strong in 2024.
And I guess to that point too, right? We did see margins kind of tail off in kind of the later part of the year. But at the same time, if you looked at EIA data, you noticed higher production levels, but also lower ending stocks. So I think that kind of speaks to the export strength that you were talking about. But can you talk about what's kind of driving the near-term weakness that we've seen?
Yeah. If you talk about the last 30-45 days, in fact, we just finished a six-day period where margins increased every day. So it has rallied back a little bit. But the basic fundamentals have been it's just a seasonal low. And we see this kind of every year where the margins are going to come off a little bit. And as you mentioned, we have seen total capacity in the U.S. over the last three years has grown by about a billion gallons of production from 17 to 18 to. And that is coming from plants becoming more efficient, people adding capacity. With the margins that we've had over the last 18 months, plants that can run profitably are running profitably. Or at least they're at least running.
I know you kind of mentioned this already. We were talking about getting that CI score down for the plants. There's a whole lot of initiatives around the corner. I know you already capture carbon emissions for the beverage industry. But with these policies, with 45Z coming around the corner, how do you think of the potential tax credit you could get from selling your CO2 into that market versus what you can get from the beverage industry? And how do you kind of think about capturing the economics from some of these initiatives?
That corner has been a big corner to come around because we've been waiting for two years. So it is a good question. And obviously, with the election, there are a lot of questions. And the pace that we're going to see the IRA rules come out is really anybody's guess right now. But as an organization, we've continued to spend money to make sure that we are ready to go when the Treasury and the USDA come out with the rules because there's a couple stage gate process there. For us specifically, and I'll go back to Brian's comments, our top focus has been our plant in Clymers, Indiana. And we have a very focused plan that will allow us to sequester carbon there. Denison in Iowa is going to be subject to whether the pipeline gets approved and then subsequently built.
And our Albion and Greenville plants, we're looking at two different options. One is increasing our utilization through the beverage industry. And one is looking at another opportunity to go downhole to sequester.
Great. Great. And I guess while we're on this track, given kind of growing demand for renewable diesel and the strong production numbers we've seen over the past few years, could you discuss your view on corn oil as a potential feedstock and talk about maybe the CI score compared to the other feedstocks out there?
Sure. So you are correct in both the supply and demand of renewable diesel has grown rapidly. Today, much like the IRA, we are waiting. We're supposed to be leaving the producer's tax credit program and moving into a blender's tax credit program January 1st. And again, we're waiting on the rules and the clarification. But if we do, in fact, move to the producer's tax credit, there is a substantial benefit for corn oil versus soybean oil in the models as it's been presented today in the neighborhood of $0.40 a gallon. So we think the story for corn oil continuing to be competitive and taking as much market share of the renewable diesel feedstock business is very high.
And the amount of DCO or corn oil that we produce will grow at a much slower pace than the RD demand is going to be there to take it if we go to the producer's tax credit as proposed. So there are a lot of what-ifs in that statement. But we do continue to monitor it. The other thing we've talked about, our renewable diesel feed stock business the last couple sessions here, the one thing that is important to understand is not only do we sell the corn oil that we produce at our plants, we trade about two times that amount, which in our total book, we're about 40% of our annual stated goal of 2 billion pounds. 40% is corn oil, 30% is soybean oil. And the balance of 30% is UCO, choice white grease, fats, and tallows.
And to add just a little bit more color there, so in our ethanol plants today, we produce about 140 million pounds of DCO, distillers corn oil. In addition to that, one of the things that we've talked about in our renewables business the past few years is diversifying outside the four walls of the ethanol plants. And to that end, a couple of years ago, you know this program, we established a renewable diesel feedstock or veg oil trading desk. And so that certainly does trade some of the corn oil that we produce. But as Bill said, that has ramped up and already has a target of about 2 billion pounds. I think last year in 2023, it was 1.3 billion-ish. And so that is an area that has ramped up a lot.
Margins have seen compression more recently with some of the startup delays and some of the issues that people have seen there for some of those RD plants, but this is an area that certainly continues to be a focus going forward.
Great. Appreciate that. We can maybe just shift over to nutrient and industrial. Maybe if you could talk about some of the changes you've been making to the business over the past several years and the improvements that you've kind of seen so far.
Yeah. One of the largest areas of growth that we're talking about is the continued development of our Specialty Liquids business. Low salt starters have been kind of the leader of that group. And then our primary focus over the last 24 months, 18 to 24 months, has really been trying to drive both efficiency and improvement in our manufactured products for lawn and turf and our co-packaging. And it's kind of taken two different areas of focus, streamlining the number of SKUs that we supply customers, and then also looking at opportunities for automation in our plants. So inside the PN group, our farm center business is going to take a very large step forward, doubling in size with one transaction. Historically, they had been purchasing one farm center at a time.
To go out and capture 10 farm centers in one transaction is really going to be fun to watch that business develop. Our wholesale business has really been kind of the backbone of the business for a number of years. We don't really see that changing. In fact, we think that the wholesale business will continue to grow as we add the farm centers and other ag products.
Great. Appreciate that. And in terms of where's your focus in nutrient and industrial when you kind of look out over the intermediate and long term, where do you see this business heading?
That's one of the areas that we really talked about in our last strategy refresh, which we just completed earlier this fall, and that is taking the knowledge and the customer base that we have with fertilizer products, so the farmers, and the understanding of the technology and continuing to find intersections with our trade group, and the regenerative ag programs that we are working on, some of them go as deep as the crop influence, and so continuing to find the opportunities between trade and the plant nutrient side of our business is really our key focus today. We'll continue to look for opportunities like Skyland, where we can tie the agronomy piece to the trade piece and continue just to be focused on growing both of those segments together.
Great. Maybe if we could just shift over to capital allocation, and I know you mentioned earlier you guys have a lot of opportunities, 70, 80 opportunities you guys looked at. You guys reward shareholders for being in the name as well through a nice dividend. Could you maybe just talk about how you balance growth and returning cash to shareholders?
Sure. Yeah. I mean, what I would say overall is we feel really good about where our balance sheet sits currently. Over the past few years, we've been able to delever. We have a target, or we continue to have a target of long-term debt to EBITDA below two and a half times. It's currently about one and a half times, but we're really focused on identifying and executing against those growth projects that make good sense and are things that are close to our core and that are going to generate appropriate shareholder returns. We do have a recently approved share repurchase authorization of $100 million on the shelf, and that's something that we'll continue to monitor and execute at the right levels, and also, certainly, we'll look at offsetting the dilutive impact of shares that are issued for incentive comp and the like.
This year, we expect to spend in the neighborhood of $150 million on CapEx. That excludes M&A. The $85 million for Skyland would be above and beyond that. We think when we look at it overall, yes, it's an approach right now where we'd rather find those projects that are going to generate above cost capital returns for the shareholders and enable us to continue to grow the business. We'll continue to balance that with some share repurchase and also our dividend.
Great. Maybe if we could shift over to the, I mean, you guys keep pushing yourselves, which we can appreciate in terms of your profitability and growth targets. Now, we realize you did have to step back from achieving $475 million by 2025. While it's kind of disappointing when you look at it in isolation, when you zoom out and look at what you guys have been able to do over the past couple of years, I think it's impressive. So I was just wondering if you could kind of talk about that dynamic and speak beyond the $475 million because I think you've outpaced your goal a couple of times.
Yeah, I'll start with that. I understand your comment around us moving the $475 million out a year. It's easy to go get EBITDA. I mean, we can achieve $475 million EBITDA, but it's going to drive down our returns, and so we have been and will continue to focus on investments that not only generate top-line numbers, but do return for our shareholders, as Brian mentioned, above our cost of capital, so we will stay with that, and as we talked about, I think, well, I know we talked about it on the earnings call, is the market shifted, and instead of just chasing a number, what we're going to do is continue to make decisions that's in the best interest of the long term, but you said, talk about the future.
I'm very excited with the team that we have in place, where we're at in the ag cycle and the financial results that we're still able to deliver. I think that the path forward is going to be pretty exciting, and we've tripled in the last five or call it six years, and so I see us continuing down that path of growth and growth that's sustainable.
And I think to that point is, look, we knew when we went out with this growth in ag markets are not going to be linear, right? And so with our EBITDA being north of $400 million each of the last two years, and then the market shifting from inverted markets to a carry market, and if the price is coming down dramatically, we fully expected that, yes, there could be a little bit of a pullback in 2024. That's certainly, I think, where analysts like yourself have modeled on a pullback a little bit there. But when you look at some of the things that we've announced more recently, so Skyland is expected to contribute $30-$40 million a year of incremental EBITDA. When the Houston project gets up and running, that should be another $10-$15 million of incremental EBITDA.
And then you think about some of the things that Bill talked about in the carbon space, yeah, some of those are delayed. And it'll be determined if some of those credits get extended. There's going to be also an interesting dynamic, certainly, that we don't need to talk about today. But those are not, if they're tax credits, then you get into the above the line, below the line. They're certainly very valuable, but they're not EBITDA per se, right? So because some of them will be below the line. But there's a lot of activity in our pipeline. We talked about this earlier. We've been seeing an increase in the number of deals. The key for us is really just to continue that discipline, right? Continue to stay disciplined because, as Bill said, overpaying for acquisitions never makes sense.
It's something that hampers you for a long time going forward.
Well, we have less than 10 minutes remaining. Just want to give a chance for any investors to ask questions here. If you have a question, please use the mic up there. And I guess if we could just leave on what's the message that you want to tell investors as kind of your parting thoughts here?
The one thought that I'd like to leave with the investors is The Andersons has been around since 1947. And the organization has been able to go through ag cycles and do very well. This latest ag cycle that we're going through, I believe the company is delivering its best results. And so our focus of the diversification across North American ag, from the producer to the end user, as we mentioned, we are in the top five in total elevator capacity. So American agriculture is here, and we're going to be part of it. And then you tie to that our understanding of being able to take advantage of whatever programs are out there. Today, it's the IRA and 45Z and 45Q. But we are going to be in this space for another 75 years.
With that, we are making decisions that are going to be able to look one or two generations down the road while rewarding our employees today.
Yeah. And I would just add to that, I would say the team is disciplined and focused and really excited about the opportunities for growth. Bill alluded to the fact that we did a strategy refresh this year. So three years ago, we did a deep dive on strategy. And that's what ultimately led us to divest our rail segment. So now we really are a pure-play North American ag supply chain company. And so this year, we did a refresh. And there's not a massive shift change, right? Because we're already a pure-play North American ag supply chain company. But there are certain places that we're leaning into more heavily. And so the team is really focused on some key initiatives that really we think could take the company to the next level.
Great. Bill, Brian, appreciate you guys being here today. And thank you all for joining us.
Thanks for coming.