Harold Edwards: It’s primarily due to the northern properties’ potential. We have another property here, Del Mar Down, that we’re doing farm management, that we’re the general partner for, but it’s a fraction of that. So primarily just the northern part now. And as we secure that in the next year, we’ll look to get more growers in all those regions.
Ben Klieve: Okay, great. And the magnitude of that was more than I certainly was expecting. Was the magnitude of that surprising to you, or was that about in line with your expectations going into the period?
Harold Edwards: It was actually a little bit above, and so we get 8% to 10% margin on that business, and what that specific situation is, they wanted to do some more improvements, different pruning, fertilization programs, and actually do some planting and planning, so it was just a bit more effort than we had budgeted in there, and so therefore, the more revenue.
Ben Klieve: Got it, very good. And last question for me, given all the various global supply dynamic that you outlined, does that have any impact on your expectations for sourcing third party fruit in 2024?
Harold Edwards: We have laid out relatively, I believe achievable growth targets. We certainly have been pleased with the reception from third party growers and handlers who are willing to let us handle their fruit, so I believe our expected growth is in the, call it 10% to 20% of total volume range, which we think we can manage relatively effectively. So I really don’t see, we’re not concerned about being able to access the fruit, and it seems like our supply chains are absorbing these sales nicely, and so we’re pretty confident in our ability to successfully grow that side of the business.
Operator: Our next question comes from Vincent Anderson with Stifel.
Vincent Anderson: Yes, thanks. Good afternoon, guys. Hey. So I was curious, where did you pick up or have you been picking up the majority of your brokered fruit gains just in terms of origin and destination? Which obviously [inaudible] asked but.
Harold Edwards: Yes, it all primarily comes here, but most of it is from Argentina, Mexico, and Chile.
Vincent Anderson: Okay and all right, well, it’s good to hear on Mexico, because I was going to follow that up with, I know you probably can’t comment on just how the discussions with the board have been going with regard to some of the longer term investments like the South American pack house. But as you’ve ramped up broker fruit and just given the importance of Mexico to the US market, has anything you’ve seen with your activities there, maybe started to shift your view of where you’d want to prioritize.
Harold Edwards: We’ve always sort of plugged part of the season with Mexican fruit because that is sort of the best supply source for a period of the year. I think we mentioned earlier in our comments that Mexico got hit by some severe heat, which compromised some of the quality and the availability of some of that Mexican fruit. In the long term, as we go forward, I think we’ll continue to operate with copackers and source fruit out of Mexico. The situation in Argentina relatively is unchanged. It remains a good source of fruit for us to broker and to manage and we continue to be bullish on our stated transition goal of pivoting from being mostly a producer of Chilean lemons into being more of a packer marketer seller of Chilean fruit.
So I think our long term view is unchanged and we’ll just continue moving down the road of our stated roadmap of asset monetization which will then free up capital, we hope, in Chile, which will allow us to then begin construction on a packing house and put ourselves in a position to become a packer marketer seller out of Chile versus more of a producer in Chile.
