Good morning, everyone. I'm John Mills with ICR, and it's my pleasure to introduce you to Harold Edwards, President and CEO of Limoneira. Limoneira, as many of you know, is a global agriculture and development company with a 132-year legacy of sustainable farming and real estate operations. And under Harold's leadership since 2003, Limoneira has grown into one of the largest integrated lemon suppliers globally, while also expanding strategically into high-value avocado production and real estate development, and also many assets in water rights as well. And so, without further ado, I will turn it over to Harold to tell you more about Limoneira.
Great. Thank you very much, John. Good morning, everybody. So you'll notice on the cover slide here that Limoneira is a company in transition, and I think that's very true. We're definitely a company you want to look forward to, and one that, if you look backwards, you'll see quite a lot of progress in our transition and some of the pivots that we've been required to make for reasons that we'll explain in a minute. But we're really excited about the trajectory we're on and the course that we've laid out in front of us. Just to begin, we have an experienced management team. We have a lot of years under our belts, and it's been a great opportunity for me to work with some really talented executives as we've gone through some of our transition.
Limoneira is an agricultural and development company that seeks to maximize value through strategic land conversion. And when I talk about strategic land conversion, what I mean is the opportunity to convert from an agricultural use to an urban development use. It typically comes with about a 10x increase in value if you're able to do this in the areas that we operate. It's not easy, but when it happens, it's extremely valuable for our investors. And then it also turns out that our abundant stewardship and ownership of water rights have not only allowed us to continue to farm profitably, but also then be able to serve the urban centers that we're developing as we go through this.
In essence, the alpha of the story is land use conversion and water monetization while you enjoy a nice agricultural coupon that'll be growing in the years to come, as we explain in just a minute, so Limoneira is well-positioned for continued global expansion and has been actively pursuing a transition, a move towards an asset-lighter business model. Today, we own and operate about 10,500 acres of land, mostly in California, but also in Arizona, in Argentina, and Chile. We have 5,300 acres of fruit-bearing acres of production. We have 200 acres that are currently in urban development, and we own over 21,000 acre-feet of water in different areas of California and Arizona. Some of those water rights are sort of on the cusp of becoming extremely valuable, given the scarcity that exists around them.
We have developed our One World of Citrus business model, which allows us to deliver fresh citrus to our customers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. We have our Harvest real estate development project in Santa Paula, with forecasts and an anticipated $180 million of cash coming back to us in the next five years. We have a three-pronged operating model, which includes growing and farm management, packing and marketing and distribution. Three primary drivers that are fueling our long-term growth are our real estate development. Real estate development takes many, many years and a lot of patience and a lot of investment into the entitlement, which is what's required to convert land from an agricultural use to an urban development use. We've become good at that. It's taken a long time. It will continue to take a long time.
However, when we get it done, the value creation is significant, and we have other projects that we're working on right now to move us closer towards entitlement of other agricultural properties. We also have a citrus business that's fully integrated from production to packing, marketing, and selling, and then we're actively expanding our avocado production, given the opportunity to expand, given the water resources that we have in the areas that we produce, as well as the United States and North America's insatiable desire to continue to consume avocados. We've updated our strategic objectives and priorities, and they exist in the following ways: one, to continue to expand our One World of Citrus in an asset-lighter way, but also to continue to expand our avocado production. We're exploring strategic alternatives to maximize shareholder value currently, and that process is ongoing.
We have real estate developments, and we're also improving our ESG efforts. The expected outcomes of our strategic objectives and priorities would be to transition our One World of Citrus into an asset-lighter business model, to streamline our operations and to sell non-strategic assets, to improve our consistency of earnings, increase our EBITDA and our dividends per share, to reduce our debt, right-size our balance sheet, and ultimately improve our return on invested capital, and if you look at the progress that we've made on that in the last three years, you'd see that we've made a lot of progress. However, there's a lot more coming, and we're really excited about the next steps that are coming. The specific progress to date is, we've developed a grower service team that's allowed us to recruit over one million cartons of additional fresh lemons into our supply chain.
We've sold four out of the six non-strategic assets and monetized over $130 million in proceeds, with $50 million of additional monetization still before us. We've established a three-year fallowing program with our watering and farming activities in Yuma, Arizona, that creates about $1.3 million of additional revenue, not from farming, but actually from not using water, which is very interesting. And there's an opportunity to sell new fallowing rights and opportunities before us with the new accord that will be put on the Colorado River in 2026. So look for that. We've pivoted in the San Joaquin Valley to more of a farming services provider and successfully divested 3,000 acres in that part of California. We've eliminated our unprofitable operations in Cadiz, too far away and too tough an environment, to successfully produce low-cost citrus.
We terminated our long-term retirement plan, which saves us about $1 million a year. We've completed the sell-out of phase one and phase two of our Harvest at Limoneira real estate development project. And ultimately, we've reduced our debt and our net debt position to $37 million. And what that doesn't include is the $66 million of cash that's sitting on our partnership's balance sheet. So if you take our 50% of that, you see that we've almost completely eliminated our total debt. So what's next? The next move is for us to achieve 80% of all of the supply that comes into our citrus supply chains from grower partners. And why that's significant is, if you looked at us 10 years ago, 80% came from our own production, which was a much heavier asset-burdened business model.
This transition is allowing us to provide services to grower partners, which allows us to control our margin structure better and enhances the profitability of the company. We are going to leverage our farm management services business. I'll talk about that more in a minute. We have additional fallowing and water monetization opportunities in Yuma, Arizona. Then we're also going to begin to selectively monetize some of our surplus water rights in the Santa Paula Water Basin. Probably the biggest producer of growth for us in the coming years is going to be our significant expansion of avocado production. In essence, in Ventura County, we have historically farmed about 2,000 acres of lemons and 1,000 acres of avocados. In the next five years, you're going to see that transition and shift to 2,000 acres of avocados and 1,000 acres of lemons.
I'll get into more of why we're going to do that in a minute. I think it's just safe to say that avocados are significantly more profitable from a production standpoint than lemons are today. We're going to continue to pursue opportunities to add more value through packing, marketing, and selling avocados. We're looking at through alliances or activities in that space, pursuing additional ways that we can add more value to our own avocado production. There's also the interesting discussion before us about the changing trends in beverage consumption. One of the fastest and most interesting growing trends in quick-serve restaurants is the consumption and growth of fresh lemonade. Limoneira is ideally positioned to be a supplier and to service some of these quick-serve restaurants that are pursuing that trend. That's been a significant driver of growth and profitability for us as well.
When we talk about our transition to an asset-lighter business model, what we're doing is we're actively continuing to grow our sourcing and our supply chains from each of the production areas in California and Arizona, while at the same time reducing our own exposure to production in those areas as well. In order to have a 365-day supply chain, you need to have access to the fruit that comes from each of those growing areas, and Limoneira then also complements that with production that comes from Mexico, Chile, and Argentina to round out our supply chains in the markets that we serve in North America and in Southeast Asia. We're actively reducing our own lemon production, but growing our supply chains through providing greater services of packing, marketing, and selling to third-party grower partners.
And this is why, if you took time with this chart, you'd see that from the years 2019 to right now, we actually had an inverted situation of revenues being below our costs. It was the result of two things. One, the significant inflationary pressures that we all experienced. A lot of it was driven by the pandemic and the challenges that that drove into our cost structures. But also, the world became oversupplied in lemons beginning in 2019, and you'll see the impact that that created on our pricing. By focusing in on reducing costs, we've gotten our costs back below where we believe the market is going to be, and so we've restored our profitability.
But given the oversupplied nature of lemons, our transition to be more of a service provider in this industry gives us confidence that we'll be able to control our profitability and our margin structures in a much better way going forward. This is really, this next slide is one that identifies the area that we're expecting growth in the coming years, in the next five years. We've accomplished about $4 million of EBITDA growth over the last three years with some of the moves that I've made and discussed. We're going to see continued growth of our grower partner business, which is going to drive growth. We have a business which we call our agency business, where we represent other citrus suppliers mostly around the world and plug their fruit into our supply chains. It's non-capital intensive, and it's really relationship-driven.
It's a great part of our growth story right now. Actually, if you look at year to year, some of our biggest drivers of growth today, it's in our agency business. We expect growth in our farm management services business as well. The biggest growth is going to come with our transition from lemons to avocados as a producer. We'll get into more of that. If you consider our baseline is somewhere between $15-$20 million of EBITDA today, the incremental growth of $30 million should get us closer to a $50 million run rate in the not-so-distant future with these moves that we're making. Turning now to our One World of Citrus and avocado business, we've developed supply chains that allow us to deliver fresh citrus and avocados 365 days a year because of how we produce and where we source.
And that's become critical in our abilities to penetrate the hearts and minds of our retail and our food service customers and has really kept us in the forefront as a supplier because of our ability to consistently deliver. We provide a critical link between the highly fragmented citrus and avocado growers and then diverse end-use markets. If you look back at our operations, historically, we always did that as a producer. But as we transitioned and actually made bold moves, if you go back into our company's history, the founders of our company were the founders of Sunkist. If you went and bought a Sunkist orange or a Sunkist lemon, there was a high probability that we'd produced it, but you'd never heard about us.
In 2010, we left Sunkist and took the company public, and that began the growth of our own brand and our own story as a supplier, and that turned out to be a fortuitously great move for us in our ability to continue to add value, not only for our customers, but also for our shareholders. In the lemon industry today, we represent about 15% of the U.S. market, and we'll continue to expand that growth. The U.S. market is growing at about 2-3% annually, naturally, and so, given the demand growth as well as our continued growth and penetration in the industry, we look forward to seeing our market share growth upwards of 20% in the not-so-distant future. We made a significant investment back in 2017 into a state-of-the-art new packing house in Santa Paula. That allows us to have about 7 million cartons of annual capacity.
A carton has about 150 lemons in it. So if you ran the numbers, you'd realize that we're selling over a billion lemons a year. That's a lot. And the investment into this packing house has given us the opportunity now to do that in a very automated way that drives profitability and efficiency, does it in a very low-cost environment, which expands our margin structure. We are currently exploring doing the exact same thing now down in Chile as we pivot our operations there from being just a producer into more of a packer, marketer, seller, providing more services to enhance our supply chain, but also continue to advance our progress in an asset-lighter way. Our farm management services division is an interesting growth opportunity for us. Just yesterday, we received approval from the FAA to be the only aerial drone spray applicator in the state of California.
Now, that won't last forever because as people learn about the efficiency of this, today we use helicopters or fixed-wing airplanes to do that. You can imagine the cost savings of doing it with drones. That's coming. And we think that's going to be a real driver of growth for our farm management services division, as well as providing agronomic consulting services and land preparation services for farmers throughout California and Arizona. As it relates to the growth of lemons, if you spent time with the slide that's up here right now, you'd see that revenues have been declining. It's not because of growth. We've been continuing to grow our supply chains, and you're seeing growth of our actual supplies. But it's really driven because of the impact of low pricing environments that are the result of the oversupplied nature of lemons.
In order for us to restore the company back to profitability, it's been absolutely critical that we focus in on driving cost out of how we produce lemons and how we drive cost out of how our grower partners grow lemons to restore the profitability back to the category, and we're proud to say it's happened. You're seeing a lot of lemons coming out, especially in Ventura County, but throughout California and Arizona for different reasons, and as that happens, we fully expect to see the dynamic of the relationship between supply and demand in lemons come back to enhance profitability. It'll just take time to get there. As it relates to avocados, this is probably the most exciting part of our growth that is coming. Today, we have 1,300 acres of planted avocados, of which about 900 acres are full-bearing.
You'll see us plant another 250 acres in 2025, and then about the same in 2026 to arrive at about 2,000 acres of avocado production in the next five years. The target is to get to 30 million pounds of production. If you consider that in the future, we believe that sustainably we should achieve about $1.30 a pound on $30 million of production. And then you'll see it costs us about $5,000 to produce avocados. And I'll show you a slide about the relative profitability in a second. You'll see that avocado production is significantly more profitable than lemon production. You can't grow avocados anywhere because they're susceptible to heat and cold, and they have to have water. And so that's another key aspect of why we're in perfect position to expand that production.
The goal is to get, again, to over 30 million pounds because of new technologies with rootstocks and varieties of avocados, as well as how we now plant avocados. We're able to achieve a much higher yield in how we produce than other producers around us, and the nice thing is that in North America, you're seeing significant additional growth of consumption of avocados, so there's a mistake on this slide. Today, or in the old way we produced avocados, we planted about 90 trees to the acre. With all the new production that we're expanding into now, we're producing with about 180 trees to the acre, and what that's doing is driving significantly higher yields per acre for us. If you think we get $1.30 a pound, we think we produce about 17,000 pounds to the acre. It costs us $5,000 an acre to farm it.
That leaves us with about $17,000 of operating profit that we achieve per acre. Multiply that by 2,000, and you'll see the significant growth opportunity with the 2,000 acres of new production that are going into the ground right now. Turning now to the next part of our business, which is the real estate development part of our business. The real alpha in our story is the ability to convert agricultural properties into urban development properties for residential and commercial real estate development. If you look in the history of California in general, you see what happened in Orange County with the Irvine Company. You see what happened in Northern Los Angeles County with the Newhall Land and Farming Company. Limoneira is the next step as you march forward or up the state from Orange County through Los Angeles County now to Ventura County.
Getting the entitlements for that land use conversion is challenging, but when it happens, it creates a significant value-creating opportunity. We've made a lot of progress, as we've talked about in our asset monetization. We have two more assets to go. We have our Chilean production assets. Our CFO, Mark Palamountain, was just down in Chile this last week. We're nearing some really exciting announcements about monetizing some of those assets and pivoting some of that capital deployment into packing, marketing, and selling. And we also have a 724-acre vineyard in Paso Robles that has 76 parcels, 10-acre parcels on them that will eventually be monetized through the sale of vineyard estates that we're working on right now. A big part of our story always has been the differential or the difference between our historical book value. We're a 130-year-old company.
You can imagine some of these assets have been on the books for a long time, and our current fair market value, you'll see there's a big disparity there, which creates a great opportunity to monetize over time to take advantage of those significant fair market value of our assets. Water rights, just quickly on the water rights situation. We have opportunities to monetize water in Yuma, Arizona, and in Santa Paula. We're excited that we're nearing some really exciting announcements as it relates to water monetization in the Santa Paula Water Basin. And then, as I mentioned earlier, you're going to see a new fallowing program be put on the Colorado River that should create opportunities for additional water monetization for us in that area. We own premium land in Southern California, Arizona, Chile, Argentina, as well as a variety of commercial properties.
Our Harvest at Limoneira real estate development project has been one of the biggest drivers of our recent growth. If you look at our financial performance over the last few years, we were successful in selling the entire phase two of our project to Lennar, 554 lots for approximately $100 million, and they put the money up to now develop the infrastructure around the lots. We now have a phase three that we're still working on and to monetize, which has 550 lots left to it. This has 250. It's really 550 lots, as well as 300 apartments that we're looking to break ground on in the next year.
We also have 32 and a half acres across the highway from the residential development, which we're working on developing a commercial development that we're calling the Harvest Medical Pavilion that will include a new hospital, an outpatient medical clinic, a quick-serve restaurant called In-N-Out, and a hotel. We're working on getting that going right now, and we're getting excited to see that development take place.
As it relates to the growth of Harvest, you can see in our deck, we've actually projected cash flows in the coming years and months, and we're excited to get that back into the company and see that growth come as well. Just quickly on ESG, we're continuing to evolve in a very positive way. Our ESG scores are going up, and we're excited with the progress we're making in that area.
And then if you wanted to spend time in our financial performance, you'd see that our revenues continue to grow. We've held our dividends steady over the challenging last five years. You've seen our EBITDA growing significantly, and we just recently guided for 2025 to produce between 5 and 5 and a half million cartons of lemons and 7million-8 million pounds of avocados, which we believe will drive significant profitability in this next year. And I'll cut it there, and thank you very much for taking time with me this morning.