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I’ve been digging more into the oxytetracycline literature. The experiments that were done were on young trees 5yo. The 35% of trees they applied the otc too I have no idea what the age of them is. It might be possible older trees are less able to rebound and may require replacing. This may take care of itself over the years. It is very interesting to me cause if alco is able to figure out how to navigate the citrus greening properly then they would have a massive first mover advantage into higher oranges price. Should be a lot of torque there. Citrus greening is also ravaging Brazil and other areas as well and compressing margines. I think production is down 50% in Brazil so I don’t think it’s as easy as other people are growing oranges so Florida can’t compete. Very interesting story.

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I'm a home gardener in Florida, and we live not too far from UF where they are making HLB resistant strains of trees. Trees take 8 years to be mature for bearing fruit, so it's a long term solution, but we might be able to estimate the effects of the otc injection on the next earnings call. 2017 hurricane wiped out 30% to 70% of fruit, so if the otc is really working well, and it was applied to all trees, and the hurricane was on the low end of fruit drop, 200 boxes per acre would drop to 140, 250 would drop to 175, etc. I don't think otc alone can get back to 400 boxes per acre, but an HLB resistant tree probably could eventually. I think harvest is around November, so we'll probably have an idea within two earnings calls.

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I've been following the company several years, let me just add some comments:

- Related to Milton, they have said that no damages at tree level, but they are pointing that there will be impact on this year production.

- Related to damages, the company shared poorly information in the past, and the impact in production was higher than expected.

- Oxytetracycline trunk injection shown very optimistic scientific results in citrus greening (tree health and production). In August, the company announced that they have applied the treatment to all its producing trees.

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I've gone back and forth on this one for years. The business is underwhelming but the land has value. Although one potential boon ALCO's core business may have is oddly enough is instability in Egypt. Egypt is a large orange producer accounting for 15% of global exports, and this has been achieve by converting wheat acreage to orchards (incidentally this has resulted in it going from the bread basket of the Mediterranean to a food importer). Desert orchards can be incredibly productive (see California's central valley) but only if you have reliable water. In Egypt nearly all the water is pumped to the orchards so if anything happens to cause even a temporary disruption, say power outages or fuel shortages caused by political instability or the country Sri Lanka'ing itself, the trees will die. And because you can't grow a tree in a year orange prices will rise dramatically.

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It might be ten years away or more, but the University of Florida is slowly developing citrus greening resistant hybrids. It takes about 8 years for a citrus tree to mature, so it wouldn't be a fast solution. But I don't think that the end of Florida citrus is imminent. Neither does ALCO as they are replanting and increase acreage under production.

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another potential issue for egypt is its water disputes with sudan, ethiopa and several other countries which get water from the nile. sudan has the advantage of being upriver from egypt.

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Brasil is the largest exporter of cytrus in the world and the US has a huge deficit of this food and therefore they are importing a lot. What do you think could happen if trump increases drastically tariffs for BRICS countries?

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I still think the tariffs are just a threat, but sometimes bluffs get called and things have to happen

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