Todd Becker: Yes. I mean, it’s ebbing and flowing. We saw a nice expansion back yesterday, but yes, I think you’re not far from those ranges today, if not, potentially even better. And look, I mean, part of our Q2 was also the fact when you don’t run and the market expands and the prices go up, you can’t execute on high price contracts, which then becomes a bit of a double whammy having to buy those in or having to cancel them and to the advantage of the person on the other side. So, for us it was – we were tracking really well and unfortunately all of our big sites hit at the same time. And while we had planned downtimes at several of them, they turned into unplanned downtimes as well. And so, it wasn’t just really just missing the margin, it was actually having to buy in hedges and also buy in sales, high priced protein sales as well, that hurt us.
So going forward, if we get clean and when as we’re clean right now that’s when we have the real opportunity to kind of achieve those type of margins and more. And we saw them higher even since then, but they’ve come down a little bit as that corn rally went up very fast and now it’s come down. I think ethanol numbers are improving again. We saw a couple weeks of builds. So I think we’re setting up for a base – a pretty good fundamental outlook for just the base fuel in the last half. And then protein as we indicated, when you have the corn soy spread doing what it’s doing and corn sitting around $5 and soy sitting around – or soy meal sitting over at $440, obviously inverted in the next year. It’s really in the favor of our strategy again.
And while we got a lot of questions from our shareholders about a year and a half ago when that spread narrowed, I think this ebbs and flows, but it’s really favorable for not just last half, but 2024 as well. And we’re seeing a good pickup in demand as our product continues to get better and better inclusion rates in rations across all the animal sectors, including pet food and aquaculture.
Adam Samuelson: Okay. No, that’s really helpful. And if I could just ask a follow-up on High Pro commercialization. You talked about a 60% – kind of 60% sales that you’re working on and getting those sales done in the fourth quarter. Can you help us frame where the premium versus regular soy meal or regular UHP would be? Just as we think about the incremental contribution from getting meaningful proportions of your production to a 60% level? And what it will take to push a higher proportion of your High Pro production up into that 60% range.
Todd Becker: Yes. Our first step is, is just to start competing really as a replacement for corn gluten meal and soy protein concentrates. And that’s really where our replacement is. As we’ve seen soy meal increase and the corn spread – corn and soy spread go in our favor for 50 Pro when you’re competing against a corn gluten meal, the spread between corn gluten meal and soy meal have narrowed a bit. So, while we’re – we’ll deal with that a little bit, I mean, what we can see today is at least on paper, a $0.14 to $0.17 uplift again, is kind of how we’re thinking about almost a double the margin again. Now that’s a starting point and we want to get involved in these rations, but the demand that we’re seeing at least nearby is coming from outside of the United States in terms of aquaculture for 60 Pro.
And then we’re working on significant demand within the United States next year in 2024 for aquaculture and pet and other areas and really in the early stages of swine. So we are just starting to – we have been working significantly hard on the program over the last six to 12 months and getting into different rations and getting through a lot of the evaluation stages. And we’re at the end of those with very, very good high marks. But again, the spread narrow between some of the higher protein products and soybean meal just because of the front end soybean meal curve. But overall, if we had to look at it on paper, we kind of look at the base margin in 50 Pro, some would be kind of $0.15 and $0.18 a gallon today, the base margin in 60 Pro is starting at kind of $0.30 to $0.40 a gallon uplift today.
And it really just some of it depends on market, some of it depends on what – where we’re going to go in the world, some of it depends on freight, but overall we see a significant uplift to that and overall great acceptance of the product. What’s really unique and differentiates Green Plains from anybody else is with our new plant JV coming on in early 2024. Our redundancy is a key and critical component and our volume is a key and critical component that we can now sell you 50,000 tons, 100,000 tons, 150,000 tons. It really – there’s no – there’s not a limit there relative to an inclusion rate. And that’s a game changer when you talk to a customer instead of having to sell them 4,000 or 5,000 tons. So redundancy really matters and it’ll matter even more in 60 Pro markets.
