Paul Pittman: Yes, I just want point amplify — I want to amplify the point, though, because it’s incredibly important, and we talk about this almost every quarter. Two-thirds of the total return to Farmland investing is the appreciation side. And so what we’re selling are the farms that are laggards in appreciation for a variety of reasons. That is largely the sales we’ve made. And the investments we’re making are places where we think there is huge upside value going forward. Appreciation rates on Illinois Farmland are materially higher through the last decade or so than almost anywhere in the United States. That is our largest location of investment. Illinois is half the portfolio or something like that, and we’re not selling there and haven’t at least yet to any major degree.
So it’s really important to recognize where the total return to the asset class comes from, and current yield is a highly secondary consideration. It’s total value creation that we’re focused on.
John Massocca: Okay. Understood. And then, one last one, in terms of the in place portfolio, you kind of mentioned that you’re largely out of or entirely out of the kind of citrus business in Florida. Any other places where maybe you’re seeing distress on the permanent crop side? Has any of that kind gotten worse, gotten better, just any kind of color there would be helpful.
Paul Pittman: Yes. I’ll — yes, I mean what’s going, so there is — so first, on citrus, we’re out of Florida. We still have substantial citrus holdings in California, and those have performed reasonably well over time complete due to a disease called citrus greening, which exists in Florida and essentially doesn’t exist in California. There’s been a huge driver of that reduction in Florida citrus I talked about. But to your question of other specialty crops, many of the specialty crops today suffer from two different problems. First is exposure to water risk in California in particular, and that’s exposure to the actual availability of water, but frankly, more significantly, the exposure to political risk surrounding water in the state of California.
So we’re — as we’ve said several times, we’re kind of lightning up on anything in our portfolio that has significant water risk. We sold a lot of assets in Eastern Colorado, for example, for that reason. So the specialty crops that have been struggling, some of the tree nuts, walnuts in particular are difficult at this juncture. There blue — we own a blueberry asset in Michigan, that’s blueberry business in Michigan, is under a significant amount of pressure. The reason for that is that there’s been a massive amount of planting of blueberries in the Pacific Northwest and some in the Southeastern United states. In my opinion, that’s not as good a blueberry, but you don’t get to taste them before you buy them in the grocery store. They’re big, plump, easy to market berries.
And they’re taking a lot of demand away from a Michigan berry, which is much closer to a wild strain berry and is frankly way more flavorful. But the person that goes in the grocery store buys the ones that look really big and uniform in size, and so it’s hurt the Michigan blueberry business. So those are places we have some challenges. They’re luckily relatively small portions of the portfolio.
John Massocca: Okay. I appreciate the color. Thank you very much.
Operator: There are no further questions at this time. I will turn the call back to Luca Fabbri for closing remarks.
Luca Fabbri: Thank you all for joining us this morning. We appreciate your interest in our company and look forward to updating you on our activities and results in the coming quarters.
Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. We thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.
