It’s a premium wool business with its genetics tracing back to 1861. In its diversity, it has large cropping operations of summer crops such as corn, cotton and rice, winter crops such as wheat, barley, chickpeas, mung beans, produces lamb, sheep meat, wool and beef. It’s an ideal acquisition for the SPAC. It’s 40 times as large as Manhattan and as big as Rhode Island. If we flip over to the next page, page 17, you can see the timeline here whereby the Bell family started purchasing land throughout New South Wales in 1993. The Bell family, for context, is a large stockbroking family, wealthy family in Australia. Over the period of time, as mentioned, they have built out a diverse portfolio of assets along with acquiring more water assets to help not only improve production and profitability, but manage any climatic downside risk. If we flip over to page 18, I’ll quickly run through how the breakdown of the aggregation lies today.
Across the Deniliquin assets, we have close to 300,000 acres of land, primarily made up of grazing land with a small amount of cropping. The Hay aggregation is very much where the irrigated cropping land is located. Again, across 140,000 acres, majority is grazing, but there is intense irrigated cotton and rice production. Coonamble is primarily dry land grazing land and dry land cropping. Across those aggregations, you can see that there is made up of a team of close to 70 individuals. In total, there’s around 110,000 sheep made up of the commercial enterprise and the Stud Merino Enterprise. The Stud Merino enterprise is called Poll Boonoke and Wanganella. They have an auction sale every year in mid-September.
The Deniliquin aggregation has a 12,000 SCU feedlot currently being updated and close to finalization and has a large 19,000 commercial beef herd. In total, there’s close to 90,000 acres of row crop acreage. If we flip over now to page 21, we’ll talk a little bit about how ANSC and the listing of AFA is comparable to other listed agricultural companies in Australia. The one company we’ve sought to make comparison is a company called Australian Agricultural Company, a large vertically integrated beef company. One of the big differences between these two companies is that AACo is very thinly traded. It is very much dominated by insider ownership with 72% of its ownership held by private individuals, the largest individual being Joe Lewis, known for owning the Tottenham Hot Spurs in the UK. One of the other major differences is that AACo is on what we call government lease land. So it doesn’t actually have title to its land. AFA is on what we call in the US deeded land or in Australia, Torrance title land. It owns nearly all of its land. One of the larger differences between the two is its location. AFA is located in the more Mediterranean, more consistent rainfall zones of Australia, whereby AACo is located in the more harsher northern parts of Australia, influenced by the monsoonal weather. AFA is again very diversified in what it produces in its commodities, therefore exposure to multiple markets. AACo is exposed primarily to the global beef market, therefore will not be as traded, we believe, as well as AFA will be. If we flip over now, I’ll hand over to David on page 23 to talk about what we intend to do with AFA.
David Leuschen:
So let’s focus now on, as Bert said, what we intend to do. Over the last two months, we’ve had a number, a large number of our folks on the ground working on modeling out these various businesses and seeing what it is we can do to enhance the economic rent at AFA. We’re very excited to say we see seven areas of opportunity. They’re listed on page 23. First, we see an incredible amount of things we can do with both the land, existing land and water, to utilize those attractive assets to create more value, what we call capital appreciation. Secondly, as I said before, we see lots of low-hanging fruit from historic understocking of animals on the ranch, as well as a number of cost-cutting things that we can pursue and through the use of additional technology and just additional water and infrastructure development, ways that we can both enhance revenue and cut costs.
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