Farm funding models and business structures in Australia - Richard Heath

The work that supports a lot of the research that you're going to see in this presentation was a project that was funded internally by the Australian Farm Institute. So farm funding models and business structures in Australia. And my talk is going to be at. It's going to be more about the environment around farm financing and business structures. I'm not going to talk in a lot of detail about particular farm level finances. It's going to be more about the headwinds, the tailwinds, the side winds, the things that are affecting what might be influencing the way that people and institutions want to finance farm businesses and the sorts of business structures that might need to be there to take advantage of those different financing options that are coming forward. So why the focus? Why did the Farm Institute think that we needed to do some work on farm finance models and business structures? It's a relatively continual cycle in the media, I must have to say, about the farm debt crisis. You don't go too long without some sort of story coming up about the amount of debt that there is in agriculture in Australia. And every now and then there's a really big flurry of attention about it and political initiatives and things that try and address the issue. So how much of an issue is it? You know, what is this debt crisis? What does it look like? Why does it keep coming up in the media? That's a pretty scary graph when you look at the total amount of farm debt Australia. So in the last couple of decades, about midway through the graph, it's just gone exponential from about $10 billion up to about $60 billion. So although, you know, in the last few years it seems to have plateaued, doesn't seem to be increasing at quite the same rate. The blue is bank debt finance. So it's almost all just debt finance from banks and it's an enormous amount. So you look at that graph and you go, wow, this is a really big issue. Farm debt as a percentage of gross farm output, same thing. So back in the 70s, total farm debt was about 40% of the total gross farm output. It reached 160% at the end of the 2000s. And it's come back a little bit now, back sort of around about 120%. Again, you look at that and you think, okay, there is a fairly significant issue with debt in Australian agriculture, but we'll go a bit further than that and look at some of the other factors around farm debt and around debt in general. So the first thing to say is that debt is not a problem. That's unique to agriculture, which seems fairly obvious. So agriculture is the blue line there and total business debt in the rest of the Australian economy is the grey line. Now there's different scales left and right. So agriculture from 10 billion on the left to about 60 billion, it's about a six fold increase over the same period. The rest of the Australian economy has gone from 100 billion to about 800 billion, so about an Eightfold increase. So everyone, you know, the whole Australian economy has obviously got this issue with debt at the moment. And agriculture, in terms of proportion of increase, it's actually not, you know, it's not. The rest of the economy is worse than agriculture. Now what's this debt being spent on? Because obviously, you know, not all debt is equal. We all understand that we need debt to do various things and some debt's good debt and some debt's bad debt. So the different colours there, the bottom two, which are the main proportions. So this is now the average farm business debt per farm, which has gone from a couple of hundred thousand dollars in the mid-90s up to about half a million dollars per farm these days. The vast majority of that in the bottom two bars is in working capital, which is not necessarily great, but it's also in land purchase. So we've been borrowing, farms have been taking on bank debt to buy farms to buy other farms to expand. And you can see that in terms of the number of farms over that a number of farm businesses by enterprise type over the last 10 years in all sectors except beef, there's been a significant decrease. So the blue is 2001, the orange is 2011. If you look at crops there, there's been about a 10,000 farm business drop in 10 years. Farms have been getting bigger, they've been buying smaller farms. The interesting thing with beef and the only one that's gone the other way is about 19,000 beef only businesses in Australia, 17 and a half thousand of those have less than 500,000 beef dollars turnover. So beef, the increase in that is hobby farms, the increase is people that just have a few cattle on a tree change block. So it's not really representative of commercial production as such. And it's really the reason why that's the only sector that's gone up. But in every other sector, increasing productivity is being driven by farms getting bigger, smaller farms disappearing. And that debt's been going into funding that. So that sort of translates into where the debt's being held. So a little bit of a busy graph, but you've basically got four different lines which are the different farm size categories and they represent the percentage of debt outstanding. So if you look at say the orange line which is farm turnovers between 100,000 and 500,000 back in the early 90s, the that was the most amount of debt outstanding was held by farms in that category. As farms have got bigger and those size farms have disappeared, that's obviously come way back down. Same with the blue line which is a very small farm's under $100,000. But the yellow line which is the bigger farms, $2 million in overturn over. They're now holding all the debt because they've been borrowing to buy the small farm. So they've been going up the whole time. The result of all that consolidation, farms getting bigger, doing more is the trend in production and output has been following the increase in debt. So the yellow line is the volume of total production, the volume of production in agriculture totally. And the red one is the gross value of farm production. So debt has in fact been funding productivity increase in Australian agriculture. It hasn't just been debt to keep everyone doing the same thing and not growing, which would be obviously really bad. Debt has been funding increase in productivity that we've seen in Australian agriculture. And again I'll just remind you that this, when I talk all these figures, I'm talking whole of agriculture. These are industry wide statistics. Individual businesses are obviously going to have experienced different stories to this. This is the average of all of agriculture. So what that looks like in terms of one of the most important things about debt, which is the ability to service debt, whether it is sustainable debt or not is quite interesting. So this line is the proportion of gross income per hectare that has been required to service interest on debt in agriculture. Now this is all of debt across all of agriculture in Australia. Again total industry statistics and it's been relatively stable. So at the beginning of the 90s, 10 cents or 10% of every gross income, every dollar of gross income per hectare was required to pay interest. That declined down to about 5% at the beginning of the 2000s. We then had the millennium drought went back up to 10% again. And since the end of the millennium drought and coinciding with lower interest rates and higher production, it's been tailing back down again to about 7%. So 7 cents in gross income of every dollar per hectare is required to service debt. But that, you know, if you think back to that initial graph and at first glance you think wow, huge issue with debt. This potentially suggests another story that in fact agriculture has been pretty good at using Debt at being able to service that debt to fund productivity and profitability increase. And another sort of backup to that, that's equity ratios again relatively stable over time. So when you look at crops, it's running around about 80%. Again, whole of industry, whole of agriculture, obviously individual businesses are going to have, have experienced different stories, quite different to that. So is it an issue at all? Is it, you know, what is this debt crisis? Should we just be keeping calm and carrying on? What's all the fuss about? Well, there is, you know, there obviously is a reason why people keep talking about debt, debt crisis, various opportunities, and there's a couple of big factors that are behind that at the moment. So debts, funded, productivity increase and it's been tailing off a little bit in the last few years as I've shown in a couple of those earlier graphs. But are we as productive as we're ever going to be? No, of course not. We're going to have to keep getting more productive. The rest of the world has been getting more productive and in a lot of cases the rest of the world has been better at getting more productive than Australia has. Our competitiveness internationally in a lot of our export markets, competing against South American beef into Asia, competing against Black Sea grain into Asia. Our really good, what we thought were secure, safe, traditional markets are getting harder and harder and harder to compete with. So that productivity increase story, it's not finished, not by a long stroke. It's going to have to keep going. We're going to have to keep funding productivity increase some way or another. We've got an aging farm population. We continually hear the issues around funding succession. So this need to have capital coming into agriculture to keep funding productivity improvements and fund succession, it's never going to go away. It's always going to be there. The Anz bank had a stab a couple of years ago at trying to quantify that in their Greener Pastures report. Their statement was that agricultural growth cannot be achieved without the support of both domestic and foreign investors. Between now and 2050, around 6,600 billion dollars in additional capital will be needed to generate growth and profitability in Australian agriculture based on current valuations. And a further $400 billion will be needed to support farm turnover succession. That's a lot of billions. That's an enormous amount. Now, you know, there's various opinions on the validity of that Anz report. They've used some fairly, how I put it, inflated assumptions in there about various things that are going to happen. The reality is about farm succession is that that figure is sort of based on every farm, the full transactional value or cost of every farm happening every time there's a succession story, that's not really the way it works in reality. But even if it's half that figure, you know, we're still talking about significant billions of dollars over the next 30 years that are going to be required to maintain these productivity increases and to fund succession. So if we go back to that increase in debt over the last 20 years, it was about six fold. If we look at half that, we go to 500 billion from 60 billion where we are now, that's another tenfold over the next 30 years. Now there's a lot of people including myself saying well those debt sustainability figures, the debt servicing industry averages, yes, they've painted a picture that debt's been relatively sustainable increasing over the amount of time, the amount of times it has over the last 20 years. But I just can't imagine that the sort of increase that we're going to need, if those figures are even close to being right over the next 30 years, that that same level of capital as debt funding is going to be as sustainable. The productivity increases that we would need to be able to do that would just be absolutely amazing. So there is this desire to look at other sources of capital. Well, you know, if debt funding is unsustainable, but we need more capital to fund productivity increase, to fund succession, can we get it elsewhere? How do we get this other capital into agriculture? Now one of the other really big contributing factors to talk around getting other capital in about dealing with the debt crisis is there is amazing interest in agriculture as an investment sector at the moment. Interest coming from everywhere, interest coming from non traditional investors into agriculture. The super funds, you know, yes, they get prodded quite a bit by our politicians to do more about agriculture but they actually do make noises about we want to invest in agriculture. We just don't know how to, you know, we think it's a really good investment class. That's just a really small snapshot of the numbers of smaller funds, investment groups out there that are setting up schemes around being able to invest in agriculture. And that's not, I deliberately didn't put the better well known ones, the Westchesters, the parraways, those sorts of people on there as well. Ag tech financing and venture capital now starting to come into agriculture. So this is a report from AgFunder that looks at the investment in ag tech in particular just gone berserk over the last few years. So the scales disappeared off the bottom. But that Last year is 2015 gone from around, you know, half and that's in billions as well. So that's, you know, gone from half a billion a year to 4.6 billion billion in agtech venture capital funding in 2015. Now agtech venture capital funding is really going to be irrelevant to a farm business down the road. But what it is a really good indicator of is the investment appetite for agriculture more generally. About the more general acceptance that agriculture is a legitimate investment class and that it's just driving capital into ag. So if there's all this interest in investing in agriculture, if there's this free capital floating around looking for a home, and if there's the demand to get it into agriculture because of the continual need to fund productivity increase, why aren't we seeing more? Why is debt financing from banks still by far and away the most used source of capital in agriculture? So if we look at the superannuation funds again, because obviously they're the biggest investor in or you know, biggest holder of funds in Australia. This is a report, this is from a report that was done by BDO last year into superannuation investment into agriculture in Australia. So it's $1.2 trillion in superannuation in Australia. $364 billion of that is invested in MySuper products. The reason they concentrated on that is because they have very good transparent reporting on what they're investing in. Only 0.3% of the those my super funds are invested in the ag sector and the most that any one of those funds had was 1%. So the most highly geared Indo agriculture had 1%. Now the other funds, the non my super funds, you know, there's obviously lots of self managed super funds and things are probably going to be a little bit higher in, in ag, particularly the self managed super funds. But you know, that's still a really informative figure about the lack of Australian investment and the lack of Australian super funds going into ag. So why is it so? In the same report they asked a lot of questions about of the fund managers, why don't you invest in agriculture? Now the story that sort of goes around a lot when you talk to people about this is that superannuation funds are too focused on the quarterly returns. There's so much pressure about having to demonstrate every quarter that you're delivering 5, 6, 7% more return that they just don't think they can get that out of agriculture that one. So a low number means that they don't agree with the statement. So this is the one that superannuation fund takes a short term return focus while agricultural investments require a long time return focus. That was actually the lowest. They disagreed with that more than anything else, which was interesting. However, the most highly, the statement that they most agreed with there is a lack of investable products at 5.7. Sort of counteracts the fact that they think that agriculture is not an issue, that it doesn't provide a short term return. Because what they mean by there is a lack of investable products is something they can get out of really quickly, something that they can get in and out when it's not returning. And then the other one too, agricultural returns are too volatile again ranks really highly. So I'm not quite sure about, you know, I think it is still an issue that they're just not prepared to take. They might say that it's not an issue, you know, that the short term focus is not an issue. But the sorts of products that they're looking for and the sort of commenting on the volatility indicates to me that they are still, they just can't quite grapple with that. It is a 20 year investment and we're prepared to put patient capital in there and wait for 20 years, 25 years, 30 years. The foreign superannuation funds on the other hand, and that's why you're seeing such a big play from the likes of Westchester and their TCREF fund in Australia. They say it's a 30 year investment and they're prepared to sit their capital there for 30 years and wait it out. A couple of other interesting things in there, the agricultural investments disproportionately increase the management expense ratio very strongly agreed with that. The other issue with superannuation funds, anything less than about a $200 million investment is difficult for, for them. They're really looking for big deals, really, really big deals. And that's again when they talk about the management expense ratio. When you've got one guy in an office in Sydney looking after a $200 million equities portfolio compared to having to have highly skilled management and a team of them to look after a $20 million farm for the same sort of return, possibly less, that's, you know, it's hard to compete against that and that's a significant issue for them. So yeah, there's a whole lot of reasons why they're giving, you know, what the barriers are to investment from super funds into agriculture. Just get, just. I'll focus a little bit or mostly now on the investable products, about the business structures that exist in Agriculture that they say makes it difficult for them to invest in. So if we look at the sorts of business structures that invest in agriculture, and I'm sure this is pretty obvious to all of you, agriculture is really heavily skewed towards partnerships compared to the rest of the Australian economy and very light on in company structures. So Australia is mostly Australian agriculture, mostly individual businesses and partnerships. Now what are other countries doing? So if this is an issue in Australia, in terms of getting outside capital into ag, in terms of business structures, that capital is there, but it's just not coming in. Are other countries doing it better? What can we learn from other countries in their ability to get different financing models in? So we look at New Zealand to start with. Again, it's pretty much owner operator focused on bank financing. It's relatively similar to us, it's not too different. But what they do have that's quite different to us is they have a really good dairy, which is their biggest industry, biggest ag industry by far. They have a great scheme for entry for young people in particular without much capital. With share milking, which is basically where you have the land owned by one entity and the cows owned by another. And approximately 36% of the dairy herd in New Zealand is owned by share milkers. Great avenue for new entrants to get into ag. It's a lot easier obviously to get enough capital to buy a couple of hundred cows than it is to buy the land that they're going to be milked on. And the other one they have is they have far more equity partnerships. So similar sorts of things where an equity partnership is where you'll have a managing partner involved in the day to day farm operations and then equity partners who contribute capital might be cash, it might be dairy cows, it might be farmland, but they're not actively involved in the day to day farm operations. Now one of the things that makes that work in New Zealand is that you don't have capital gains tax when land is sold. So you can buy in and sell out of equity partnerships really easily. So it's again this thing about entry and exit, the things that the Superannuation Fund say is difficult here in Australia. Now the other thing though, and this is really important that New Zealand has, look at it, you know, their productive certainty compared to Australia. I mean, I know it looks like that around here now, but it looks like that around here every year in New Zealand it's just the ability to set up businesses that you know are going to just turn over. You're just turning the handle just Perform year after year gives that stability, particularly for pretty high, you know, for new entrants it'll be really high. It might not be as much, but it'll still be really highly geared if they're coming into a share milking operation or something like that to do their sums and make it work. Brazil has quite a few alternative farm financing products and some quite entrepreneurial ones as well. Well, I'll just focus on one because it's quite illustrative of the way that things work over there. The CPR farm product bond allows farmers to access capital by financing intended production or produce already stored. So these are bonds that a farmer might take out as he's planting a crop or even pre planting a crop and he'll sell off a certain portion of his production, can't default on delivery of that. And then that bond is actually a tradable commodity. So these bonds tend to get accumulated and packaged up. So the co op that the farmer is a member of might accumulate bonds to begin with and then they might get accumulated into a bigger package and then they get traded in great big packages. So it's a bit like the, the mortgage securities that were the reason for the part of the reason for the global financial crisis actually. Similar sort of theory, but the big difference. In Brazil you've got such a massive agricultural industry over there, you've got risk mitigation insurance from the producers. So the amount of insurance products that you know you have to deliver on this, you can't default. So the insurance to back up if there is some reason that you don't is really important to make it work. And the acceptance of those bonds and the tradability of them is really important and really well accepted in Brazil because agriculture is just a really big sector of the economy. It's a really well understood and well valued investment class in Brazil. But then again also like New Zealand, it's Brazil, you know, you're growing soy after corn twice a year. It's just turning the handle again. It's just a really safe, secure, productive environment. Until very recently these CPR bonds were promoted as one of the safest investments you could have. Not massive returns but you knew you'd get your money back. And they were just really, really, really reliable. Now quite interestingly I was reading this morning about how they have just the reputation of the CPRs have suffered a little bit just recently because there's been a few high profile failures. But they come down to the South American attitude towards record keeping. Because the reason there's been failures has just been a systematic issue around the ability to keep track of the bonds and where they're coming from. And, you know, some farms have sold accumulators have accumulated more than is actually being produced and that sort of thing. So the production that is backing the CPRS has still been there, but there's just been some failures around the systems that support the CPRs. But they're still, you know, still a really highly regarded financial instrument in Brazil, usa. Again, quite different to Australia, with a lot of variation in the sorts of financial products that are available. And one of the main things that drives that is a really deep and liquid land leasing market. Again, a fundamental difference in taxation to here in that the reason that land remains, you know, in sort of small parcels owned by individuals and then leased out to farmers who might have, you know, they might work with 15, 20, 30, 40 landlords in small parcels is because there's really hefty taxes involved with selling land. And so unless they're transferred within families or intergenerationally or gifted and so on, so that people tend to keep the land and then lease it out. So you have a lot of absentee landlords continually leasing. Now, what makes that work again is that the people doing the farming that are paying the leases, they have security via the government. So in New Zealand and Brazil, we had security in terms of the productive environment. In the US we've got security via the government in terms of the insurance products, the crop revenue coverage, revenue assurance insurance, income protection, livestock risk protection, all the subsidies and support systems that provide farmers with the security that they can go and lease these lands at actually really quite high, high rates. Now, I'm going to be a bit cheeky here and play a video to demonstrate this. One that just really caught me. I was in the states a couple of weeks ago. The Missouri Republican primaries were on the weekend. I was there and the television was just full of political advertising. And there was one that just really struck me about how influential the agricultural lobby is and how important agriculture is in terms of the overall political environment. Just illustrating how these sorts of things I don't think are going to go away. So you think we have some media about foreign ownership here from time to time. It's nothing compared with what they have over there. It would really just blew me away. But, you know, it's just agricultural politics is mainstream over there and all those sorts of subsidy systems and farm bills and things that provide that security to farm production, that then in turn provides the environment where there's a bit more I guess entrepreneurship around the possibilities for farm finance models and products and things that support a bit of variation to bank debt financing, it makes it work. So what have we got in Australia? Well, massive climate variability. Seems like it's either one or the other of those and nothing to mitigate it really. I mean, you know, it's maybe not quite that bad, but it's certainly a lot closer to that than it is to usa, Brazil or New Zealand. So it's no wonder that the sorts of finance products and business structures that have evolved over time are pretty conservative. They're conservative by nature because we have to deal with that and we really don't have any other support, external support to help us in dealing with that. So understanding the sorts of things that Simon was talking about in terms of just nailing down a business system that works, that works to averages over time that you can financially sustain through debt funding through a good reliable business structure. There's a reason, you know, a very sensible reason that Australian agriculture looks like that. But that's not to say that we still aren't interested in other models that agricultural industry looking to take advantage of the capital that's out there and wanting to get away from debt financing as much as we can. So what are some of the alternatives? What are some of the differences that are coming up that we may or may not be able to take advantage of? So crowdfunding obviously is something that in recent years has taken the globe by storm with all sorts of opportunities more traditionally associated with tech products or entertainment in a sort of reward based model. So crowdfunding for rewards. So you give some money to someone to build an app or record a song or something like that and you might get an app back or a song back or something like that, some sort of gift in. Recently, equity crowdfunding and crowdfunding for lending have actually started to take off as well. So equity crowdfunding over the last five years has had a compound annual growth rate of something like 115%, which is basically going out there and offering a part of your business, crowdsourcing for a party business. People will invest and have some sort of equity in your business. And lending crowdfunding, where you put an opportunity out there, people invest and just expect a rate of return just like you would with any other loan that you put out. So you think, well, what an opportunity. The whole point of crowdfunding is you're putting yourself out there to the world. It's easy to get dollar from a million people than it is to get a Million dollars from one person. So is this a great opportunity for agriculture? This girl here, Madeline Scott near Melbourne, crowdfunded a pasture laid organic egg production on her own. I think she was 16 or 17, something like that, on the pozible crowdfunding platform. Well, sorry, I've already talked about that. So yeah, equity crowdfunding has grown at about 114% and lending based crowdfunding's grown at about 78%. Now unfortunately the Australian government as tends to happen when new things come along and there's no regulations. Well, we better have some regulations. So at the end of 2015, the Australian government regulated equity based crowdfunding and it makes it pretty difficult now for broad acre farms. For large scale broad acre farms you have to have less than $5 million in assets to be able to participate in equity based funding and you have to be a public company. Now the reason you have to be a public company is because every investor has to be treated as a separate shareholder and you can't have any more than 50 shareholders as a private company. So there's not much point having less than 50 shareholders if you're going to go crowdfunding, which really, you know, that's why you have to be a public company. So you know, for small niche agribusinesses, pastulate, organic chickens, berries, horticulture, I think crowdfunding is definitely something that is a potential source of revenue for a 5,000 hectare wheat farm. Probably not so much. Who remembers the managed investment scheme disasters of the 2000s? Yeah, Simon, you might have lost some money by the look of that. Sort of vigorous response. No. So particularly in timber plantations around Esperance and southern Australia, a lot of people lost an enormous amount of money. They were based on an instrument called Australian real estate Investment Trusts. They're vehicles that give investors access to property and they provide a regular income to the investors through a drive from the asset as a rental or a lease as well as a longer term capital gain. And they were quite attractive and still are attractive because they provide access to assets that may otherwise be out of reach for individual investors. Now they got a terrible reputation obviously through those mis failures back in the 2000s, but they're a bit back in vogue now because some good regulation this time. The failed ones, great Southern et cetera, were what was called unstabled, which means that the business associated with the land and the land were treated separately and the investors were only investing in the business and not in the land. And the business model was based on some really favorable tax concessions that was really the only thing that were making them profitable. And the fundamental business model behind them in growth rates of timber and that sort of thing, they just didn't work once all that sort of fell out. The fact that they were unstable from the capital growth in the land just made them completely unsustainable. Unstable. REITs are no longer allowed. So real estate investment trusts now, if you invest in them, you're investing in the business and the land so you get the capital growth as well. Now there are some really long term, quite successful real estate investment trusts in agriculture, such as the Rural Funds Management which has significant investments in almonds amongst other things. And they're one of the only products out there that are really attractive to both retail and institutional investors because you can invest $10,000, you can invest $10 million in them. And so they're quite attractive. There's a lot of people looking at REITs again as potential models to get outside capital into agriculture. Collaborative farming. Who's heard John Gladeigo speak? Who knows who John Gladego is? Yeah, a couple. John Gladego is a Nuffield scholar. Ten years ago, I think who did his Nuffield scholarship on business models in farming. He came back and formed a collaborative farming partnership with his neighbour which basically meant that they were both sort of at a scale where they had one a planting unit ahead or a sprayer each. But when they looked at it, the just efficiency of that operating that gear at the farm sizes that they had just wasn't working. And so they got their heads together and they said, well, let's form one business. We'll still own our farms individually but we'll farm them with one business. We only need one farming unit to run across the two farms. And so they formed a business, they both became employees of that business. So they derived income both as employees of the business, but also as the business that was farming their farms paid a rent back to them and they optimised as much as they could the efficiency of the business and the operations and everything farming those farms. Since doing that, they've now gone to a second unit, second farming unit, so bought more land and now running two planters, two sprayers, two headers, all that sort of stuff. So collaborative farming, multiple farming businesses combine to form a single optimum efficiency business, as I said, receive income both from being an employee and from the profits of the business. It's really a joint venture in a lot of ways. Apart from the fact that both the joint venture farmers, both the joint venture partners have, you know, their interest is in farming directly. They're bringing to the table their farming businesses. Whereas a traditional joint venture, you again combine operations or resources from, from multiple businesses or investors. But one of the other partners may only be contributing land and not actually working in the business or not have as much as a hands on operation in the business. Now John Gladigo now gets asked to go all around the world speaking about collaborative farming. It's a very logical approach. It's getting a lot of interest from people and groups all around the world. So look, just three, like I said. Yeah, I'm sort of wrapping it up now. I wasn't going to talk too much about the actual, you know, the types of individual business models that there are out there that are available. It was more about trying to give you a picture of the bigger picture, things that are influencing the way that banks, corporations, investment funds are thinking about financing and thinking about the sorts of business structures that you need to attract outside capital. So as a summary, Australian farm businesses, they are predominantly partnerships or single owners funded by bank debt finance. We're all probably pretty aware of that. There's a reason why they're like that. They're conservative business structures and financing options because they've suited the variability of the productive environment in Australia and that's going to be a really hard thing to get over in terms of the potential for more entrepreneurial sorts of financing arrangements. Total debt has been growing and so that's what drives a lot of the talk, a lot of the media around the debt crisis. There is absolutely no doubt there's an enormous amount of total debt in agriculture now. However, at an industry level, at an average, the serviceability of debt has remained manageable. There is though a need for more external capital and that the interest in agriculture as an investment sector, both those things are keeping a focus on alternative funding models and business structures. So people are continuing to look, things will keep popping up. I think there'll be. It won't be revolutionary, it's not going to happen overnight, but there will be a continual involvement of the sorts of products that are out there and the sorts of opportunities that are going to present themselves. The countries that are doing it a bit more than we are in terms of alternative things. They all have other factors that Australia doesn't have. They have either more stable production or more stable business environments that gives the security and the confidence to develop these alternative financial products. The ability to attract equity partners requires nimble. What that means is easy exit structures. So, you know, no matter how much hype there is and I use the word hype because a lot of it is hype about agriculture being a good investment class. The reality is that investors are always going to be nervous and are going to want to be able to have exit options. They're going to be wanting to, you know, they'll put their money in, but they're going to want to know how to get their money out. So just again, equity partnerships, leasing, crowdfunding, REITs, collaborative funding, joint ventures, stock leasing. There are alternative products out there. They're going to continue to grow. You just got to keep your eye out. As Simon and Mark were both saying in their presentations, every business is going to have a different risk attitude, a different set of family circumstances, a different set of business circumstances that may or may not make any one of those more attractive. I guess the only thing that I'd leave you with is that I do believe that there are going to continue to be more opportunities and different financing alternatives present themselves. So just keep your eye out, I guess. And finally, just like to thank the AFI's corporate supporters and sponsors. Thank you.