S2:E1 Price Risk Management

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Show Notes 

In our current world of extreme volatility, managing risk that comes with commodity necessities is essential. Gaining access to timely information and flexible purchasing options can make a big difference in the bottom line of a business. VP of Energy, Eric Adair and Bruce Richman, Price Risk Manager, discuss how Ceres Solutions works alongside local farms and businesses to help them make the best purchasing decisions for their energy needs.  

At Ceres Solutions, fuel contracts can be made up to 18 months out, but cannot begin in the current month. Historically, the further out you get the more expensive the fuel is due to carry in the market. Recently, uncertainty in the market has led to backwardation, meaning the further out the contract date is the lower the futures price. 

“Normally, that is a short-term situation but we have seen that basically since November of 2021, the market has been backwards,” shared Bruce. “So, at this point we’re trying to figure out is this the new normal? In all likelihood it’ll return at some point to where there is a carry in the market instead of backwardation, but there is no timeframe to know when that may happen at this point…The market is extremely backwards right now and it's going to take some time to rectify itself.” 

This backwardation could be an indication that traders expect demand to decrease. Whether its and even like Covid-19 that crashed demand to nearly zero, or a possible recession that could reduce demand overall but less severely, this fear is causing this uncertainty in the market. In addition to demand uncertainty, the production supply chain is also creating uncertainty by moderating production rather than producing at full capacity as oil companies have traditionally done. 

“I learned a long time ago from my predecessor, when the markets have uncertainty, volatility is the end result,” state Bruce.  

So what can you do to manage your risk? Customers have several options for securing their energy needs. The majority of customers Bruce works with contract their fuel to turn their variable expense into a fixed cost. This give peace of mind and security in budgeting for the future. 

Bruce and the team Ceres Solutions works alongside customers to understand their goals. They then work to build a plan that accommodates those needs. Contract minimums start at 1,000 gallons person contract period. They encourage customers to contract a percentage of their fuel needs to allow for flexibility in their business and also cash prices. When the fuel is delivered, the customer decides whether they pull from their contract gallons or take a cash price for the day. After that is decided the customer is billed, which means no money is paid upfront for your contracted fuel.  

To learn more about Ceres Solutions Energy visit https://www.ceres.coop/fuel or reach out to your local Ceres representative.  

A Glimpse At This Episode

2:25 Meet our Guest, Bruce Richman 

5:35 Why Contract Your Fuel 

9:15 Less Expensive Futures 

14:30 Contracting Requirements with Ceres Solutions 

16:45 Securing your Price 

Transcription 

Morgan Seger (00:00):
Every day we rely on food, fuel, and fiber. But how much do you know about these industries we depend on? In this podcast, we dive deep into the production and processes of these everyday essentials. This is Field Points, an original podcast production from Ceres Solutions. Welcome back to Field Points. Today we are kicking off our second series and it's going to be focused on energy. So I'm very excited about this. Energy is something that I have a lot to learn about and I was thrilled with the guest we had on our show. Every single episode taught me something new about the energy industry in Indiana and Michigan. My co-host on this series is Eric Adair. Eric is one of the VPs of energy for Ceres Solutions and he does a great job really pulling out some of those details from our guest. Our first episode on this series is going to be all about energy markets. Our guest is Bruce Richman. We have been noticing extreme volatility in our energy inputs in this episode. Bruce walks us through what's causing some of that volatility, what consumers should know about what's going on in the energy market and also what consumers can do to hedge their risk in this time of just extreme volatility. First, let's meet this series co-host Eric Adair. So
Eric Adair (01:16):
My current role here at Ceres Solutions is I'm a vice president of energy. I share those responsibilities with Howard Jones. Howard covers the west side of the state. I cover the east side, so the territory I oversee would go from the Indianapolis area up to say Cadillac, Michigan. So we have our sell about, I don't know, a hundred, 110 million in refined fuel. So gasoline, diesel, fuel, and we sell approximately, depending on grain dryer years, 25 to 30 million gallons of propane. And my role in that is leadership role. So I am an officer of the company, I am on senior staff and again, I have a great team. Fortunately that reports to me, one of 'em is Bruce Richman here, that's here with us today. So I oversee price risk management with Bruce as well and that's how I'm involved I guess in energy.
Morgan Seger (02:22):
Our guest today is Bruce Richman. He's the price risk manager for Ceres Solutions and has been with the organization for almost nine years.
Bruce Richman (02:31):
I manage all of our fuel contracts from our customers and on the supply side with what we buy from Country Mark. I really enjoy working with customers. Each one will be unique and different. They have different reasons for looking at price risk management. Some of them have different reasons for looking at price risk management and it's not a situation where one size fits all everybody or some will have will fit into different groups is about why they're looking at pricers management. And that keeps it interesting because it is a little bit different most of the time. Rough and rough numbers, about half of it is ag customers and then the other half is what we call commercial or industrial type customers, which may be anything from trucking companies over the road, trucking companies, excavation companies, quarries, any type of business where they're using heavy equipment that could be on road and or off road at their facility.
Morgan Seger (03:34):
I think we're all used to seeing some volatility when we're dealing with a commodity, but in the last few months that volatility has seemed more extreme than what we have seen recently. So Bruce talks through why that is
Bruce Richman (03:47):
And that is a challenge today for sure. The volatility has went off the charts at least over the last six months where we might see small swings within prices pricing during a trading day today we can see huge swings, meaning 20 30 cents a gallon or more inside one eight hour trading day, making it extremely challenging from a volatility standpoint. Our role or I've always felt our role in precious management is to inform the customer. It's their decision to make. We don't necessarily recommend what to buy or when to buy. We can provide information in historical data that help them make better decisions for their business. So we do that in a number of ways. They'll be a growing number of customers. They'll just pick up the phone and call <affirmative> and ask me what, what's going on at this point, at the end of each working day, I do a energy insights. It's kind of a recap of what's transpired in the markets that day doesn't really, it's not geared to look forward his, here's what happened today and here's what you can expect overnight. With that, we do some email information with customers. I know you've been instrumental in putting some things together on social media where we can get the word out as well.
Eric Adair (05:20):
So Bruce, when you contract with these customers, are most customers interested in, I don't wanna use the word, well, I will use the word making money. Are they doing it to save money to, are they doing it for a budget? What's the primary purpose when somebody contracts with
Bruce Richman (05:35):
You? Yeah, and that's a good question and we talked earlier about how it is not a one size fits all for everybody. There are those customers who are more of, for lack of a better word, a gambler that says, Hey, I can absorb a little bit of this. I'm gonna try to hit the vast majority of the customers, the contract contract though, are looking to take a variable cost and turn it into a fixed cost. In other words, for their budget. <affirmative> had a particular situation a few weeks ago where this particular company has business booked into 2023. He had to put his fuel pricing in his bid, his bid was accepted, the current fuel price on the contract side was advantageous. He said Book the fuel. I don't want to take any risk in that because he's already got the business booked. So one, once again, we try to look at that from each customer's perspective and then a lot of times we learn a lot more about the customer with our ears than we do our mouth by, you know, ask a few questions and then listen and they're gonna tell us what they're looking for in price risk management and why they are looking at contract and fuel.
Eric Adair (06:54):
Yeah, no that's great. I mean that's great information. I just think it's so important always that the customer understands that most of the time we're doing this for budget purposes then rather than speculation. But like Bruce said, there are people that feel like they want to hit the low. That's just very difficult to do
Bruce Richman (07:10):
And those as we mention do, those are very few, there are a few like that, but the vast majority are looking at budget reasons why they want to contract.
Eric Adair (07:20):
What are some of the pitfalls or disadvantages of contracting
Bruce Richman (07:25):
Fuel? Yeah, I mean it can be a double edged sword. If you contract fuel and prices go down, you're still under contracted by the fuel at the higher price. We saw that happen initially after Russia invaded the Ukraine prices skyrocketed. A lot of people booked, some people booked fuel at that point in time and then it dropped after that. Now it's rebounded, but it may not necessarily do that. So there is risk in there when customers do book fuel that the price can go lower and we try to explain that to each of them. Most of them have contracted for years and when we get somebody new, they'll ask questions or we'll ask them questions as to what they're looking for and make sure they are aware that that possibility exists.
Eric Adair (08:14):
You had mentioned, you know, had a customer recently that booked out in '23. So what's the maximum, could I book fuel in 2025? I mean, how far out are you able to go?
Bruce Richman (08:26):
Sure, we can contract fuel out 18 months. In some extreme cases we can go out a little bit further than that, but on an everyday basis we can go out 18 months. You cannot contract in the current month. So for example, if somebody called today and wanted to book fuel, that contract could not start until November the first. Yeah, because you can't contract in the current month and we could go out through April of 2024.
Eric Adair (08:52):
Okay.
Bruce Richman (08:53):
Right now.
Eric Adair (08:53):
Yeah. When you go out farther like that, is the fuel always more expensive? I mean is it cost more in the future? Is contracting more expensive, less expensive
Bruce Richman (09:04):
And in my nine years we've seen it on both sides of the fence. So what normally happens in the market is the further out you get on a contract, the cost goes up a little bit. It's called carry in the market. What we're seeing right now is just the opposite of that in the market where the futures, the further out you go are actually less expensive than are now. Normally that's been a short term situation, but we've seen that basically since November of 2021, the market has been backwards. So at this point we're trying to figure out is this the new normal? In all likelihood, it'll return at some point to where there's carrying the market instead of backwardation, but it there's, there's no timeframe to know when that may happen. At this point, the market's extremely backwards right now and it's gonna take some time for that to rectify itself.
Eric Adair (10:03):
So just to clarify, by backward you mean that if I were to book fuel for say, oh next April it would be cheaper than the contract for next month?
Bruce Richman (10:15):
That is correct. No, absolutely. And to that point, what we're seeing right now is it's not just a penny or two difference, it's a huge difference.
Eric Adair (10:24):
A huge difference?
Bruce Richman (10:24):
We could see 20, 30 cents if you get out 18 months, 50, 60 cents a gallon different rather than it is today, than it is today.
Eric Adair (10:32):
So that's probably some indication traders are speculating that either the United States might go into recession, we might slow down, which obviously we slow down, there's gonna be less fuel use, therefore prices would be cheaper.
Bruce Richman (10:44):
Correct, correct. Yeah. And right now with some of the volatility we're seeing, it's because the markets, there's a lot of uncertainty in the markets right now, and I learned a long time ago from my predecessor that when the markets have uncertainty, volatility is the end result. What we have right now is we have that on both sides, both on the supply side and the demand side demand as Eric mentioned, if we go into recession could, it could slow demand down significantly. We saw that happen in Covid when demand dropped almost off a cliff and the bottom fell out on prices because there was no demand there. I'm not forecasting that would happen this time with a recession, but when demand does drop, prices tend to follow that. What's odd or what's not normal right now is some of the uncertainty on the supply side. There's a lot of excess capacity out there to produce more oil both domestically and overseas, but it's not being done.
(11:46):
Yes, we're not growing that part of the business. Some of that is oil has been a boomer bust. They would just pump all the oil they could pump until the bottom fell outta the price and then they went into a bus mode. And this go round, it's been a little bit different. The leadership in a lot of the major and then even some of the independent oil companies have said, we're not doing that anymore. We're going to try to keep more of a, instead of peak and valley, more of a level line when it comes to production levels. So even though today we're producing more than we were at Covid Covid time, we were around 10 million barrels a day domestically here in the US about 12 million today. But at the high right before Covid, we were producing about 13.1 million barrels. We've never gotten back to that point and it doesn't appear like that's going to happen anytime soon,
Eric Adair (12:46):
But we're producing, so we're producing a little less, but the economy's a little stronger, at least it as of right now. So that's why you're seeing the price of diesel fuel gasoline so high.
Bruce Richman (12:55):
That's right. Correct. The relationship between supply and demand at this point, demand is still super strong. Really strong supply has been steady. So when that happens, demand is winning and when demand outstrips, supply prices go up.
Eric Adair (13:13):
Sure. So with all that news and information you provide us, when's the best time for someone to contract fuel? <laugh>
Bruce Richman (13:21):
And I used to be able to answer that and with a decent level of certainty. When was it? Yeah, there was always, we called it a sweet spot and that sweet spot would normally historically happened sometime between Thanksgiving and Valentine's Day. Then 2020 and Covid hit and it's not been the same since we've seen it in April, we've seen it in August. We've seen it all over the place. The one thing this year, if history repeats itself, which at some point it may, yeah, we don't know what's gonna happen this year of course, but with the recession possible recession coming, maybe demand slowing down, we may be setting up for a sweet spot sometime this winter. The hard thing to talk about that is I'll know whether the sweet spot was hit or not in about April or May
Eric Adair (14:19):
After the fact after it happened.
Bruce Richman (14:20):
Sure, that's exactly right.
Eric Adair (14:22):
Yeah. Tell me about contract size. How many gallons can a customer is, would you sell a contract to mean do they need to buy a hundred thousand gallons? I mean, tell me a little bit about what the requirements are for someone to contract
Bruce Richman (14:35):
With you. So Country Mark made it really nice for us to be able to contract very, in some cases very small farmers all the way up to huge trucking companies or commercial accounts. The minimum on contracts is a thousand gallons per timeframe per product. So
Eric Adair (14:57):
We could gas, diesel, offroad, diesel, onroad, diesel and it doesn't matter.
Bruce Richman (15:01):
 No, none of that matters. We can even contract and do contract some 90 core gasoline for some marinas as well, <affirmative>. So those are possibilities as well. It's just a thousand gallon minimum for the timeframe. Those timeframes can change from anywhere from a couple three months to 12 to 18 months depending on the market conditions and what may or may not make sense at that point in time.
Morgan Seger (15:26):
If you follow energy crude markets, you may recognize Brent and WTI. Bruce walks us through what that spread means.
Bruce Richman (15:35):
Yeah, so Brent, Brent crude is oversees, I always call from the North Sea area and then WTI as West Texas intermediate crude. Those generally trade in relation to one another. WTI has been trading a little less expensive than Brent crude of late. I think that's more the norm of what we see probably do as much to anything to transportation and the strength of the dollar because crude oil is always traded in US dollars. So when the dollar's strong, that puts pressure on crude oil prices lower and vice versa.
Morgan Seger (16:17):
Next, Bruce walks us through the process of contracting and working with Ceres Solutions and some of the benefits you'll see in this process.
Bruce Richman (16:25):
And that's one of the great things about our program and partnering with Country Mark is you do not have to pay for the contract up front. I know some competitors or some other companies you do with us, you not pay for the fuel as you take delivery just like you did if you were taking a cash or a spot fuel. So what happens mechanically I guess in behind the scenes in the office when you call or email or whatever and book fuel, the first thing I do is turn right back around and buy the fuel. I can't give you a fixed cost unless I know what our cost is. So we do that back to back Once again, country marks made that very easy in the fact that I have the exchange, a lot of our sales people have called that the hot screen. It's live for me to look at.
(17:17):
I can a lot of times while I'm on the phone the guy says I want 15,000 before we hang up on his conversation. The fuel's already been bought in this volatile market that's huge because it can change so quickly. Once you've caught as a customer's called and booked to fuel and we've purchased the fuel, the next steps in the process is we'll get a contract or contracts entered into our system and then they'll be emailed out to the customer for their signature and then they can return 'em at their convenience or return signed copy of the
Eric Adair (17:50):
Contract. Okay. I know you have a big contract, when I say contract list, there's a lot of customers that you send daily pricing to, correct? Correct. So that would be a cash, daily cash price and also a futures price. Correct? Correct. So my question is, if I get that email from you and I receive it on my phone, is the price you sent me in that email, is that a good price?
Bruce Richman (18:15):
Yeah, once again, it depends on the volatility and I'll answer that this way. The cash pricing, the spot pricing comes out about eight o'clock at night and that's good for the next day. That's the rack price, bought price, cash, price, whatever terminology you want to use there. That's good for basically a 24 hour period on the futures or on contracts that our system takes a snapshot, we call it a snapshot around 1130 in the morning and it emails that out to customers that want to contract pricing. All it does is says if you book right this minute, this is your price, five minutes later it may have changed one way or the other up or down. So that's been a point of emphasis to educate customers to under so that they understand just how volatile things are. Now, when I started doing this several years ago, my gosh, the guy might get his price at 1130 in the morning and book it the next morning and it hadn't changed hardly at all. <affirmative> today that's not the case in any way, shape or form. I couldn't tell you the last day we had where that happened. It's been months and months ago.
Eric Adair (19:24):
So they would call you for a firm price?
Bruce Richman (19:26):
That's correct. Yeah, I'll get 'em, get email tax, whatever the customer's preferred way of communicating and we have that information live and that get to that point that are ready to pull the trigger and contract fuel, we can shoot that number or they'll say that I get a lot of emails, it'll say, Hey, if it's still around this price, book it for me. If it's changed a lot, I'll send them the new number and they'll say yes or no at that point in time. Never a problem if it goes lower of course, but we want 'em to not be surprised when they get their contracts so they know upfront what their price is gonna be.
Eric Adair (20:07):
Yeah, no, that's great information.
Morgan Seger (20:10):
So would you say that contracting or at least having that conversation with you is gonna be the best way for them to manage the volatility that we're seeing today?
Bruce Richman (20:19):
Once again, I think it depends on what their goals are. If so many, if customers are looking at, I've had a number of them when Russia invaded said I can live with four and a half or $5 diesel fuel, whatever it was, I can't live with $6 that's going to put me under or whatever the case may be. They've done the math <affirmative>, they know where it needs to be. So a lot of them will manage that just to avoid those peaks and spikes that happen from time to time in pricing. We just went through that not too awful long ago, refinery over in the WHI Indian area had an electrical fire and it shut it down for a couple three days and sure enough, you know, see a spike and supply to some terminals. We didn't have that problem with Country Mark, but some terminals had issues. Just being able to have fuel to supply.
Eric Adair (21:18):
Would you recommend that customers contract all their fuel? So if a customer uses 50,000 gallons a year and they call up and talk to you, would you recommend I'd buy 50,000 or would you recommend they buy
Bruce Richman (21:31):
Less? Yeah, we rare really don't want to get into a situation and rarely do where it's advantageous to book a hundred percent of the fuel. The problem with that runs into what if your business changes, what if you don't use as much, you're still obligated to take that fuel and you give yourself no room, no margin for error, both from a pricing standpoint or from a usage standpoint if you try to book it all. So when I mention that about a pricing standpoint, so let's say we recommend a maximum of about 70%, you can go any percentage up to that, but we try not to go over 70%. So let's, for just hypothetically, let's say Eric, you booked 50% of your usage in doing so, that other 50% you can pick and choose when you want to use your contracted fuel provided that you use it all by the end of the contract period date.
(22:33):
So that's where some of the managing of contracts come, comes in and pushing information out to our sales people and our managers and we also can do it through our automated system again where I upload and it sends them what their contract balances are. That has was one of the more recent enhancements to that program that we did and probably one of the most beneficial, I've had more positive comments from customers about getting their contract balances via email. It just puts it out there to them so it's on their mind. Again, we try to send that right around the first of each month, give or take a few days as to when it falls. I will say this, we do it at least double when we get into November, December and then again next spring. In those heavy, what I call the heavy contract months where we have so many gallons at our contract, we want the customers to be aware
Eric Adair (23:30):
Of that. So you sent the customer an email Yes. To let 'em know how many
Bruce Richman (23:33):
Gallons they have left? Yes, it goes through our automated system. It's the same program that we use for pricing and different things like that. It's just, for lack of a better word, a different module that will send the customer their contract gallon balances.
Eric Adair (23:46):
So if I contract 50% of my fuel and I get a delivery, who makes the decision if I gotta pull my contract price or if I get to pull a cash load for
Bruce Richman (23:57):
The day? Sure. So once again, depending on the delivery type, that's usually handled a couple of different ways. If it's tank wagon, a lot of times what will happen is the customer will tell the drivers that I wanna use my contract or no, I don't this time. That's pretty simple On the direct loads or the full transport loads of 75 or 8,500 gallons on gasoline, we generally between dispatching that load for the customer, those conversations take place internally and with the customer ahead of time so that when we see those loads were delivered the following day, we can bill it a accordingly. It's a system that has been, it's tried and true a lot of moving parts, but as long as all the parts do their role, it works really well and we end up not rarely do we need to invoice a
Eric Adair (24:56):
Customer. So the customer has a lot of flexibility on what they want to use.
Bruce Richman (24:59):
Absolutely. They
Eric Adair (25:00):
Have, as long as they pull, are able to pull all their fuel in the set amount of time.
Bruce Richman (25:03):
Absolutely. And part of managing those contracts between what I do and getting the information out to our sales people and managers and is we those customers like yourself that you mentioned, if you have 50% and you've taken cash or spot prices for a long period of time, you're gonna hit that point of no return where now you gotta take contract, you have to take it or you're not gonna be able to fulfill the contract at that point. Those are conversations we can have ahead of time because we can get the information out to the people that are actually, whether it be the psr, whether it be the manager, whether it be the salesperson that's dealing with that account, or they'll see it on their automated email if they're set up to get that. It's all about getting information in people's hands. It's rare that we have an issue if we're able to provide an information. I think we have three or four different ways to do that and the combination of those seem to make it work pretty well.
Morgan Seger (26:03):
Bruce, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. I appreciate that you took time to talk about this short term volatility but also that long term view and what you're kind of expecting. If there's someone listening who wants to learn more or is interested in maybe contracting, how do you suggest they reach out to you?
Bruce Richman (26:20):
Sure. Their method of communication that they prefer, you can always call the Wabash office and they can get ahold of me if I'm not here, they can reach out to my cell phone. You can email me at b Richman series dot co-op and that's spelled R I C H M A N, sir. And emails or calls. Either way, whatever works best.
Morgan Seger (26:45):
Thank you so much to Bruce for joining us on this episode of our Energy series. Eric helps me wrap up this conversation by giving me some closing thoughts on price risk management.
Eric Adair (26:58):
I mean, to summarize Bruce's job and his role for serious solutions is to provide a tool to our customer base that allows them to set a budget I would highly encourage that meets their fixed needs. Like Bruce said, I don't think Bruce could have said any better. We are taking a variable cost and we turn it into a fixed cost and that is very helpful for whether it be a person running a farm, managing a business to control their cost and know what their return's gonna be at the end of the day.
Morgan Seger (27:35):
So yeah, one of the things that I like, a trend that I picked up on this conversation that we also had in our last series is that you don't take anything at face value. You really try to understand what your customer's needs are and what their goals are and then you kind of build a plan around that, which I think is really
Eric Adair (27:52):
Neat. We absolutely do. I mean absolutely that is the objective here is to meet the customer experience. What we offer is very unique in this industry where we don't have to put any money up front. That is not a norm. The size of contracts that we offer is very unique. Somebody who is a larger user, say a hundred thousand gallons a year, that maybe they would have other options, but somebody who uses a 10,000 gallons a year, they don't have near the options that we can offer them because number one, they either gotta buy a full contract, which typically trades at 42,000 gallons. Okay? Country Mart breaks that apart for us, so it limits it down to 7,500 gallons. Then we take that contract and we'll split it apart for customers and that's how we get down to a thousand gallons. So by doing that, it does put some risk on us.
(28:46):
I mean, think about it, if a person calls in today, they want to contract a thousand gallons and we're not long any gallons, we have to buy a contract on the exchange to cover that. The minimum we have to buy 7,500. So we're still long then 6,500 gallons of fuel, there's a lot of people new, they contract three 4,000 gallons of fuel. There's a lot of people that contract 50,000 gallons of fuel <affirmative>. So we have some big users that contract a million gallons of fuel. So we see a wide variety of individuals and we can tailor to their needs and we can do it. And I think it's the most user friendly platform out there. Cause when we talk to our customers, often if they look at our competitors or competition, they have to put up some form of money <affirmative>. They gotta pay for some of it early and they can't do the flexibility on our contracts that we can do being a cooperative.
(29:36):
And obviously, so when we say we have a partnership with Country Mark, the cooperatives own country Mark, so the farming cooperatives of Indiana are country Mark's owners. So we have a great relationship with them. It is a separate entity obviously, but they work to help us for sure country does and they know our customer base very well. So they have tailored this to meet the cooperative needs, I believe. Okay, to answer your question, yes, I mean if you look at the Exxon Mobs of the world to say they're gonna build a contract to service 7,500 gallon person, I don't think, I don't wanna speak for them. I just don't think that's gonna exist. <affirmative>, that's not the world they live in. They live in billions, millions of gallons. The country market refinery is a small refinery in southern Indiana. It is about 33,000 barrels a day IT services.
(30:36):
If you look at a BP widening refinery that Bruce mentioned up in Chicago, I believe that refinery is some around 400,000 barrels a day. So over 10, 10, 10, 12, 14 times the size of country. Mark just one of the refineries, let alone how, I don't know how many they have lots, sure <laugh>. But by having that, it's unique to us. It's also proprietary. It's their own pipeline, their own product that's coming through that. So we have a lot of control and we have a great partnership and our success is also their success. <affirmative>, they have a very captive audience. All their proprietary fuel, they sell only to the cooperative system. So it's truly a, I mean what's makes it co-op great and what they were founded on is you can take a smaller group of people and turn it into something that's very beneficial to that small group.
Morgan Seger (31:26):
The show notes for this episode will be available at series dot c e r e s dot c o o p. If you enjoyed this deeper dive, be sure to subscribe and leave us a review. Your review and feedback will help other listeners like you find our podcast and we are so thankful for that.