Brad Nordholm: Yes. I think if you take the first half of the year and kind of use that rate of growth on a notional dollar basis for the second half, that’s probably baseline. It could exceed that. We are committing additional resources to this area. For example, we haven’t announced it yet, but we’ve just had an acceptance for a very senior experienced renewable energy executive who will be charged with bringing a bit more organization and both internal administration, but then more aggressive external outreach for those programs. And that reflects our optimism about our opportunity to kind of double this book every year for the next couple of years with that $1 billion being in the sites just a few years out. And so – and we think it could double again after that.
So you’re seeing a commitment of additional resources internally, and that reflects our – not just optimism, but our confidence in the depth of this market and the comparative advantages that Farmer Mac has from a funding and national reach standpoint, and being a player in that market.
Q – Unidentified Analyst: Okay. That’s very helpful. I was hoping you would mention something like that under the hiring discussion. Building on the energy loan book comment, and I don’t want to get a better understanding how this business works, but I see some companies like Hannon Armstrong and Ameresco that are doing these renewable energy projects and funding. And Ameresco, I think it’s more of like a design build, but can you help people understand, is there a difference between like, let’s say, a Farm & Ranch loan, I’m a farmer, I want to do a project, I build a barn or something – that’s kind of – I don’t want to mischaracterize it all, but just to simplify it, maybe that’s more of a one and done.
But from what I’ve seen with some of these renewable energy companies, maybe design, build, maybe more project oriented. If you can get kind of hooked in as a project financer on Project A, is there an opportunity to be funding on B, C, D projects that they’ve been lining up going forward?
Brad Nordholm: Yes. So for individual projects, our sweet spot is probably the projects that require about $5 million to $25 million worth of debt, where we’re taking all of it. So that’s going to be – take 2x debt. That’s going to be a $10 million to $50 million solar project, that’s going to be somewhere in the range of 10 to 50-megawatt solar project covering somewhere between 50 and 250 acres. And so a lot of these are being done in rural America. Some are being done on warehouses, but we’re always looking for that connection to rural America. And it could be because the buyer of the electricity, is it electric co-op or corporation that is serving rural America? It could be because it’s located in rural America.
So that’s one part of it. Another part of it is the much larger deals where we may participate in the bank debt syndicate for that project. And you’ve seen that – we’ve done that in a couple of very, very large wind projects, again, set in rural America. The credit metrics are pretty much always the same. These are low investment grade BBB- BB+ credit metrics, very well established, well used. We’re not doing anything very different or creative. It’s just the national outreach and focus on rural America. The strategic the companies you mentioned as examples of potential strategic partners. Yes, we are talking with them and very current discussions. And you are correct in that if they are serial developers and there are many others out there, it provides an opportunity to – as long as we’re competitive and responsive to become really a preferred supplier of project finance debt and do project after project after project.
