Mark Wong: You’re welcome.
Operator: Our next question comes from Brad from Jennie Montgomery Scott. Brad, please go ahead.
UnidentifiedAnalyst: Hi Mark and hi Ms. Horton. How are you? I’m doing my due diligence on the seed opportunity with biofuels. I run into this castor bean. Is that something you’re looking at, or have you just decided that the camelina is just the better go-to seed for the opportunity with biofuels?
Mark Wong: Yeah, camelina is our first choice right now, for lots of different reasons. So again, we look for areas to produce camelina that we can do it as a second crop, right as our fathers told us, they’re not making any more farm makers. So we need to — my belief is we need to farm every acre twice, basically, once a year for food crop and once a year for an oil crop. And those areas up in Idaho as an example, Montana the eastern part of Oregon and Washington that are pretty dry. Those areas are pretty key opportunities for camelina. We could obviously look at — we will look at other crops, but it’s a little too early to say whether castor bean is going to fit into what we think is a product line that has broad appeal and it, but yet concentrates on the geographic areas where we have strength, where we have relationships with farmers.
That’s always important. We have to have a reputation, hopefully a good reputation with farmers. So when we are trying to get them to try a new crop that they’re willing to do that. And so we have to be a little bit careful how wide we spread our net geographically because we do want to concentrate on the areas that grow best for Camelina to start with and we’ll be looking at potentially castor bean others in the future, but it’s a little too early for us to sort of talk too much about what other oil seed crops might be in our portfolio.
UnidentifiedAnalyst: Okay. With the infusion of capital to S&W with the Shell venture will that really improve your negotiating clout that I assume is ongoing with CIBC?
Mark Wong: I’ll let Betsy answer that question, Betsy?
Betsy Horton: Yeah, no, thanks for the question, Brett. It certainly improves our situation overall, right? It takes out the mortgage that we had on the Napa facility and allows us to take a facility that was underutilized for just using for alfalfa and to get the processing services that we need from VBO at a more market rate. So it improves cash flow and improves our debt situation as well by taking out that mortgage. In addition, the cash that’s coming in that has come in and will come in one year also improves our situation from a banking standpoint. So with all of that you know, continuing to discuss with lenders and make sure that we get a good refinance in place ahead of the CIBC maturity that’s coming up here this spring.
UnidentifiedAnalyst: Great. And one last one, just a brief update on the Stevia initiative.
Mark Wong: Yes. We’re still talking to Ingredion about the Stevia opportunity. There are real opportunities there and the situation with China politically seems to get beginning no better with the balloons and other things flying over North America and the Air Force being forced to shoot them down. You just can’t afford to have your full supply of Stevia leaf being in — being grown in China. And that’s the situation that Ingredion finds themselves in. So these — but these things take a while. Our agreement with Shell, we negotiated over a year to accomplish that and that’s why I gave my thanks in the call at the end of my statement to all of our S&W people who helped us get there. We had over 50 meetings with Shell and because it was a complicated deal because it involved a worldwide relationship with Shell, not just the North American relationship.
