Good morning everyone and welcome to today's webinar. I'm Nathan Joraanstad, Fintech product manager here at Bushel. Bushel is a leading Ag tech and Fintech company playing in the space, in the software space, and we are excited to share with you about what we're we're doing today. Today, I'm joined by my cohost here, Doug Richards. Doug, is from CFA. Doug, why don't you introduce yourself and your company and tell us a little bit about what you do? Alright. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Doug Richards. I am both the chief operating officer as well as the chief technology officer for CFA, so I do have two jobs. Been here for about five years. For those of you who are not familiar with Cooperative Finance Association, when I joined the organization about five years ago, we were a competitor in the marketplace. We are now the leader in the marketplace. So over the past several years, we've grown about fourteen hundred percent our portfolio size with some of the top producers and top cooperatives in the country as part of our portfolio. So we're very, very proud of that. Cooperative Finance Association is an eighty three year old company. We came out of the farm credit system several years ago. We specialize in in input financing. We do not do real estate. We don't do equipment. We specifically do do inputs. We are very, very excited to partner with Bushel and and looking forward to the conversation today and and giving some more details on how our integration has come together and and what the partnership's gonna look like moving forward. Cool. Thanks, Doug. So today, we're gonna be talking about ag retailers, how we can help reduce payment delays, improve cash flow using our digital tools. We'll talk a little bit about our integration with CFA and what that means for retailers and and borrowers and we'll get into that here in a moment. We're gonna spend a little bit of time talking about kind of the state of the industry a little bit here to start. And so, Doug, in terms of day sales outstanding, right? So a metric that companies track and measure to make sure that they have proper cash flow. They're getting paid on time. They're getting paid early if possible. How have you seen day sales outstanding become a factor in the egg space as it is today, as well as how that has been changing with the availability of things like digital tools or other forms of payment. Great question. I think we'll we'll dive into this in several different ways through the next, hour or so. But, you know, the the the change of of the business in general, the landscape of change has been kind of omnipresent for the last decade or so. You know, I think as you know, organizations across all industries have digitized and have moved more towards electronic systems and away from paper based systems. We're seeing a lot of the the same, the same common common problems across multiple industries, and and ag is no different than that. So, you know, the the the struggle with ag is has always been traditionally that when you're talking about agriculture, you're you're typically talking about large volume, large, large, large payments, large, large purchases, large paybacks. You know, these are these are things that, you know, even traditional community banks struggle with. So for for us, I think the the digitization of of the the the process, we're we're seeing a, you know, an increased speed in in in providing answers and results back to our to our customer base. And I think, again, the the digital wallet that that Bushel has created is going to help expedite that even further. Sure. Yeah. We'll talk about that a a lot more in detail as we get going. I wanna talk about the paper check, right? Everyone, you you you instantly smile when I bring it up. Right? Everyone knows checks are a problem. Can you talk a little bit maybe, maybe actually, maybe to start, how many of your customers that you work with, your retailers, are satisfied with what they're getting from the United States Postal Service today? Can it be less than zero? Because I think it would be absolutely zero. Yeah. I'm not I'm not sure there's a lot of satisfaction with with that organization, period. But I do smile on on the paper checks. So part of my background is is ecommerce. A large part of my background is ecommerce. And as as recent as, you know, fifteen years ago, I was running the largest ecommerce company in in the world at the time. And this is when e commerce was was a tiny little industry. So that sounds like a humble brag. It's not all. We were very, very small industry. But at the time, one of the things we struggled with was was the trust factor to be able to take payments online. Now that sounds weird to say today. Fast forward fifteen years and everybody has an Amazon account, everybody has store credit cards, everyone has, you know, all the all, you know, push button shipping. It is fascinating to me that, you know, this kind of last bastion of payment that being the paper check still exists heavily. But if you think about the reason it does, it's there's a combination of factors. I think you could probably say that there's a there's a certain level of distrust when you're talking about, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars coming coming through an electronic payment system. You know, there's the inconvenience of actually going to a bank. I mean, in a lot of cases, in rural communities, you know, your bank may have limited hours, may have limited telepresence. There's, you know, you essentially have to schedule an appointment almost to actually go to a bank for a wire transfer these days. We have done as much as we can through both our lockbox enhancements and obviously our field finance, which is our primary platform for origination and customer interface. We've done as much as we can to help ease that. I think that right now the number of paper checks that we're seeing are going to decrease dramatically and they're gonna decrease dramatically because of necessity. Has to be a solution for this because the reality is they're not secure at all. I mean, dropping something in the mail is much less secure than putting something online, which is hard to explain to a non internet generation, but agriculture moves more towards you know, the Internet natives who are taking over and, you know, consolidation and and the other things we're seeing, I expect we're gonna see a lot of change in in the next couple of years. I know that there's obviously, you know, discussion of banks. Banks checks are very expensive for banks to manage and handle. They would rather be out of that business as well. So I think a lot of, forces both inside and outside the industry are gonna help influence putting us into a better place. Yeah. It seems like really checks are just kinda how people have done business for, I don't know, probably over a hundred years. And so it kinda just makes sense to continue doing so however however long it's been. You know, you look at other countries in the world where they didn't have a banking infrastructure, and now they're all of a sudden coming together with with, you starting to have financing and bank accounts and those things. They don't have checks. Right? Everything's done on their phone. Everything's done mobile, remote, the Internet, etcetera. In terms of checks, I mean, I've I even talked to one customer. They had a customer call in, say, you know, three weeks later and say, hey, I I thought you sent me a check. I never got it. And they did some research, dug dug into it a little bit, and turns out somebody had actually robbed the post office mailman at gunpoint and took all the checks and was trying to wash them and change the names on them. Talk a little bit about the, the fraud that you've seen in the industry in terms of checks and, maybe why the industry, the ag industry is so stubborn about maintaining reliance on that paper check. Again, I think I'll answer the last question first. I think the reliance on the paper check goes back to the size of it's the dollar amount, right? I mean, there's a certain point where know, if you think about, the fees associated in a standard commercial appliance, the fees associated with electronic payment, they're they're pretty extraordinary, right? Where a paper check costs you next to nothing. I think there's there's consideration there. And when you're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars, you know, those those those processing fees can be can be very prohibitive. And that's that's certainly a consideration. And again, I think, you know, the the the wallet not not only being a a payment vehicle, but also but also a way to to safely and securely store funds is going to change that conversation dramatically as well. But I do think that, you know, when you think about the, you know, the industry reliance and fraud, you know, we we built a lot of fraud protection in the field of finance. We work with LexisNexis. We we do OFAC, which is in compliance with the government. We do we do a lot of check checks in the sense of security checks to to ensure that that, you know, we're we're building the system to alert us to any fraud that is occurring. The reality though is when it comes to a paper check is we don't have that luxury. And there's a lot of trust that goes into it. And there are instances where, and I would never speak specifically about customers, but you could certainly cast some hypothetical stories around, you know, paper check where potentially it was written from, you know, the wrong account or is written without permission. You know, in consolidation, one of the common stories that we hear is family members who are joint owners in land and and farms. And by maybe not right intentions, they're doing business that's a little bit outside of the family norm and that then becomes fraudulent activity. So there's, I think, could, again, could cast a lot of kind of hypothetical stories around it, but the reality is that a check is very, very hard to prove and to process and it is slow. And for us, that becomes a reconciliation activity because, you know, if you if you write a check on, you know, day fifteen, by the time it's processed and it's, you know, day two of the following month, there's interest accrued. There's there's, you know, this whole reconciliation process goes into that. So I for one am am looking forward to the day where we never get another check-in the mail unless it's from published and clearing accounts but I think they're out of business. Yeah. So, yeah, on that point, I know I've heard a lot of talk about the Fed actually even in the next few years deciding to just cease processing checks altogether which at that point, if you don't have an alternative plan, you know, your business is kind of at risk, right? Like, how are you gonna take payment, process payment, or even send out payment if you're relying on checks today? If the Fed, who is the one that goes and make sure all these checks are being processed is gonna stop processing them at some point. Right? So we talked about, you know, reducing day sales outstanding. You know, obviously, if you're waiting for three weeks for a check-in the mail, your day sales outstanding is gonna be pretty dramatic. And so we gotta we gotta have other tools, software that allows for them to make payment in another method, an electronic method. But even then, let's say that you do have the ability to make a payment tomorrow, you might not have those funds as a farmer. Right? Egg's hard right now. So how have you seen the rise of lending in the ag space, particularly with farmers? And how have you seen that as it impacts CFA? So I probably started at broader response to that. I think about that question in regards to industry in general. And my background is heavy in financial services and banking. And in banking, the top of the funnel is the credit machine, right? I mean, that's really what it comes down to. And banking is most people I think outside of banking think of banking as a deposit business. It's actually a lending business, right? And that's we on the agriculture side, when we think about agriculture is the same, through that same lens, it becomes a whole lot easier to understand why credit is so important. You know, the the largest companies in the world all the way down to, you know, small mom and pop shops, most businesses operate off of credit. And there's, you know, there's, you know, payments in arrears and payments in advance and all the things that come around that credit is a necessity to to do business at a scale. And, you know, the larger scale, the more important it is to have credit. And I think the rise of, you know, the electronic credit, you know, with, you know, SANS, you know, being able to go into your local cooperative and, you know, write your name on a piece of paper and basically build a line of credit with those types of relationships becoming digitized, becoming more normalized and becoming more broad based. I think that credit is a very, very critical part to the growth of agriculture. Again, I keep coming back to the same idea of consolidation is a very real part of our business. And, you know, over the last thirty years, we've seen such a as everyone knows, a tremendous shift in agriculture and the landscape of agriculture. And credit has been a large part of that. I mean, the ability to consolidate across, you know, across acreage is incredibly important and credits are requirement for them. I mean, there are very few people who have very few companies, I should say, that have the cash on hand to go make large purchases. So immediately they go into credit, they go into real estate, you know, and then that that obviously from for us on the input finance side, those those inputs, when you're talking about doubling, tripling, quadrupling your input requirements, credits, again, a requirement for that. And, you know, we are very proud of the fact that, you know, we our mantra is, you know, we do what's best for the system. That's very important for us. And by doing what's best for the system, we focus on what's best for the farmer. And what's best for the farmer at the end of the day is to provide them the ability to do business when they're ready to do business. It's as simple as that. Provide them the credit when it's time to make that decision that you've been holding off on and you need the funds and you need those available. Our funding with our patronage program as well, we are very, very proud of what we created there. And I think that's you know, credit is is going to become more and more necessary as in every other economic downturn when when, you know, market squeeze, credit becomes way more important because it's gonna be your lifeline that's gonna keep you afloat for a couple of years until the market switches back to normalized and then, you know, credit credit becomes, you know, more of a balanced appliance at that point. Sure. So a farmer, you know, needing to go buy all of his inputs this year. It sounds like it's maybe a little more expensive with the situation we have going on. They need to go buy those inputs. They might not have the cash today. So they could go to traditional lender, like their local bank or they could go with, an FCS organization and get a line of credit, and they could spend that anywhere. How is your financing different than that? Well, several ways. So number one, we're a member owned company. So so the CFA, the cooperative in in our in our title is not just a word. It's actually our our corporate structure. Because we're member owned, our members, direct us through through our board of directors, through the the feedback loops we get from them through voting and other and other ways. We are directed by the market to do what's best for the market. And again, our patronage program is probably what we're most famous for. So not only are you able to, as a member, not only are able to use credit inside CFA, you're returned on that credit. I mean, we returned, I think last year was around eighty three percent of our of our earnings were returned back to. So that's that's a big part of where where we are. We're we're, again, nontraditional in the sense of the way that we're owned and the way that we're structured. So, you know, they think the the number one advantage that we have is that we truly a cooperative owned by growers and in service to growers. Right. And you do all your lending through your dealer or retailer partners. Correct. Can you tell me a little bit about that experience, both for the farmer and the retailer as it exists today in your system? And then maybe what you saw in what Bushel could provide that made you say, hey, let's work with Bushel and make this experience a little bit easier for everybody? Yeah. That's that's a great question. And, you know, I'll start with the last question first. So, you know, I'd I'd actually presented at a conference, almost two years ago, and Jake, your brother Jake, had reached out to me and through Aaron Haspel and and asked just for a quick conversation, and we we had a chance to talk. And Jake, I headed off meeting. He's he's a great guy. And got Ross Johnson, who's our CEO involved in the conversation. And really, the vision that was that was that we all collectively shared was how do we how do we digitize the relationship with the gate? That's something that we talk about a lot internally. You know, the relationship with the gate, if you think about from a from a dealer, a cooperative dealer, that relationship up until, let's say, maybe twenty years ago when it really started to ship was literally someone getting in their truck and driving to a farm and standing at the gate and shaking hands and looking at a field and saying, it looks like you're gonna you're gonna, you know, open up the back there. So, you know, what are you gonna need this year? Literally writing down and put sheets and orders and doing all the business. That business itself has the tools that we use to conduct business like that have changed and they become more and more digital, but the relationship is not. And the relationship's really critical to us. That dealer relationship, that trust factor of, you know, the smallest cooperatives to, you know, the large cooperative organizations in the country, We treat all of those those organizations the same because even more member up, they are they are our bosses at the end of the day and and making their life easier. So for example, small cooperative, you know, two, three employees, they have a certified lender, but that's not their full time job. They have ten other things that they're doing all the time. If we can take as much as much as possible, we can take the burden of the origination and all the all of the servicing that comes along with that, If we can remove that in a way that's that's equitable for them, equitable for the grower, then but but but still helps the grower be be as successful as possible. That's the that's the nexus. It's really the heart of the relationship with the game. We talk about digitizing that. That's as the chief technology officer, that's my ultimate goal is how do we digitize that? How do we create efficiency, but always keeping a focus on maximizing that relationship because that's really the value. Yep. Cool. So I'm gonna pull up a slide deck here, and we're gonna walk through our relationship today and how little bit about Bushel and and what we do and the technology that we built, and then we'll talk about how we've worked with CFA to integrate in their loan program into our system to make it nice and seamless and and easy for both the retailer and the borrower. So, I'm gonna pull that up here. So, a phrase we like to use here at Bushel is when everything flows, you feel it. Right? And so our goal is to make things easy to do, and the data moves quickly, the the finances move quickly, everything, there's not paperwork being done, it's all done digitally, and if everything flows well, it just goes well, right? And so that's our hope, and, you know, when we talk about sending paper checks and it waits three weeks in the mail, that's not flowing well, right? So, how do we improve that? When you're needing to go do your reporting at the end of the year as a farm and you need your scale tickets and you need all these things, you know, if it's all on paper, that doesn't flow well. So how do we make it so that everything flows well within the industry? And to do that, we really have three kind of core technologies that we've built over the years. The the the first one is kind of what maybe most people know Bushel about historically would be our our agribusiness SaaS product, right? So our customer portal, our staff portal, our CRM, it's a tool that we sell to agribusinesses, retailers, elevators, etcetera, that they can pay us for. We would integrate in with their ERP, pull in their data into our system, and then make that data available to their farmers and to their staff. So you have a farmer that can log in, they can see their invoices, their statements, they can view their scale tickets, all that right within a single app or online portal. The same thing on the staff side. They can log in, they can see that data, they can do things like CRM, they can send out e signatures, push notifications, and the farmer can send in send in grain offers, they can submit payments, they can roll in direct deposit, which we'll we'll talk about more here in a minute. This is kind of the traditional Bushel product. So very good offering. We continue to improve that all the time. We got lots of agribusinesses using this software today. The next piece is our Bushel Farm product, formerly Farm Logs from many years ago. It's our farm management software. So farmers can log in, they can view, you know, map out all their fields, they can view their rainfall, their heat units, They can track all their activities, do their cost accounting, and it's integrated in with all of our our our FinTech technologies here at Bushel. So this is a great great product. Anyone that does open our Bushel business account, which we'll talk about in a minute, they do get the the first tier of farm for free. And so we got a lot of customers using that tool today and getting a lot of advantage in doing so. Again, making the data flow. So pulling in data from their machine data from John Deere, etcetera. Really excited about this product. And then we have Bushel Pay or Bushel Wallet. There's quite a few things we're doing in this space. And I'm gonna talk about it in more detail obviously as we go because that's really the primary integration point with CFA. You can enroll in direct digital direct deposit. So you can now get paid versus as a farmer if you go and deliver grain or something and you're selling something, you can get paid digitally rather than having to wait for that three weeks for the check to get in the mail. You can pay your invoices online or your statement right directly in the app, directly to the retailer. Comes with the Bushel Business account. I'm gonna talk about that in much more detail. With that account, you also get a debit card. And then Lender Connect, which is kinda where CFA fits in, other FCS orgs FCS orgs that we work with, they all fit in to say, hey, let's really make it a place where farmers can really manage all of their accounts in one place, including all their loans and lending that they have. And then the last piece, digital lean management. I'm really excited about this one. This is really probably one of the biggest reasons why checks are still so prevalent in the ag space. If you're a farmer today and you have a loan and the lender has put a lean on your crop, you can't just go and, sell that grain and get paid to your bank account. They have to write a check with multiple parties on it. And then you have to go drive around and get sign off from your lender to deposit that check. We are really excited about solving that problem and just eliminating that problem for the agribusiness and making it simple and smooth and efficient for both the lender and the farmer. There's gonna be more that we share about that in the coming weeks and months. But let's talk about how we are helping digitize input financing with CFA. Now I'm gonna talk first about kind of like the core piece or technology that enables all this, and then we'll talk about how we've then integrated with CFA from there. The the main thing that makes all of this run is called the Bushel Business Account, which we really call the Bank of Account for the American farmer. It's a checking account, a DDA account, easy to open online, doesn't cost anything to set it up. There's no minimum balance required and you can manage all of your accounts in one place. You just hit add account, add additional bank accounts, hit add loan, add your loans. You can manage all those funds. You can move those funds between accounts right within one place. A centralized place to have all of your financial accounts. With that Bushel Business account today, you can earn a two point seven five percent interest rate. If the Feds keep the rates how they are, that's how the rate will stay. The interest on that is calculated daily and paid out every first of the month. And then we also have partnered with our bank, the Bancorp Bank out of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. We partnered with them in having a sweep network of banks where we have actually over twenty partner banks in our network that allow us to increase what would normally be a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar FDIC insurance limit up to five million dollars in FDIC insurance. So if you're a farmer and you do have some funds for a while, and it's millions of dollars or maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars, you can park all that money in the Bushel Business account, take advantage of that interest rate, and it's a great product. And with that Bushel Business account, within the application, you hit this nice big blue transfer and pay button and right from there, get all your money movement capabilities. So the first one on the left here, you can deposit in your wallet. Let's say you have a hundred thousand dollars in your bank account. Maybe you're making point one percent interest on that. And you're like, you know what? I don't need this money right now. I'm gonna go dump it in to this Bushel business account. I don't need I don't have any bills to pay right now. I'm gonna move it into that Bushel business account and take advantage of that interest rate. So you can do that right within the application. You can deposit a check. So we have mobile check deposit. You can now deposit a check up to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars per check directly into your Bushel Business account. You can transfer out to another bank account. So let's say that you got a payment, it's been sitting in your account for a while, you're earning that interest rate, and for some reason you need to move that money out to another bank account, you can do that right within the application. Send in request. So now you have maybe an agribusiness that you owe money to or a farmer that maybe came over and helped out with harvest this year and he you're gonna pay him or he's gonna pay you. You can the Bushel business account is a networked bank account. Meaning, you can go in here, hit send in request, and search for anybody else that has a Bushel business account within our network and you can pay them or request money from them right there. That's something that really the industry doesn't have today at all. And that's something that is really exciting and enables a lot of the other functionality that we do today. And then ultimately at the bottom here, can make your loan payment. We'll talk about that in more detail as we get into it. You also then, with a Bushel Business account, can opt in to get a virtual or physical Bushel Gold Visa debit card. Obviously, Visa is one of the biggest card networks, if not the biggest, probably the biggest in the space. And with your Bushel debit card, you can now spend the funds in your Bushel business account anywhere that Visa is accepted. And so you're leaving those funds there, you're making a good interest rate, and now you can spend that money anytime, anywhere as you need it with that Visa debit card. And then finally, it is a an actual Bushel or an actual bank account with a routing and account number. And with that, you can go in and grab that routing and account number and you can enroll in payments online. Like, let's say you have a heating or electricity or different business expenses that you have to make that you can do they have an ACH online form. You can fill that out with the routing and account number directly from your Bushel Business account. And then also you can use that routing and account number to go and enroll at various agribusinesses or others that are paying you via direct deposit. And all those funds land right in your Bushel Business account. With all of that technology, that banking infrastructure that we worked with our partner bank with on, now allows us to do fun and exciting and really beneficial things for the end user in the lending space. So let's talk about what we've done with CFA. In your Bushel account, you log in, you then go and hit this link alone or line of credit button on the home page. In there, you then see the list of loan providers. I just have a, you know, generic Ag lender co here as well as CFA. If you're a CFA borrower, as of as of a few weeks ago, anyone that has a CFA loan can attach their loan to their Bushel business account in order to move money, make payments, etcetera. And so you just click on CFA, enter your loan number, and then you agree to some terms and conditions and you kicked off the process that we then validate with CFA to make sure that yes, in fact, this person that has this account also has this loan. And once that is approved, you now have your loan showing up right within our application. And so you can see here I have a CFA input financing loan and I have multiple child loans within that. So maybe I have a chemical for a certain organization or fertilizer or seed and there can be various interest rates on that. And you can see all that information right within this application. You can click on any of those child loans and you can go and see what's your available credit and interest rate, any other information you might need there. You then click the pay my loan button. And then here is where one way in which we are helping to eliminate the paper check. And again, you know, Doug brought up one of the big concerns about checks or going away from checks is that it might cost a lot of money to move that money digitally. Well, good news for the farmer, making payments this way, there's no fee. Bushel does not charge a fee or transaction fee in order for you to make these loan payments. So you would just choose what line you wanna pay from or maybe a tranche, a specific tranche. You choose that. You're then shown a few different options. Maybe you wanna pay it off. Maybe you wanna just pay the interest accrued. Or maybe you wanna enter in a custom value, custom amount. Then you choose where you want the funds to come from to make that payment. Do I wanna use my Bushel business account? Do I wanna use an attached bank account? Maybe even another line of credit that I have attached to my application. And then obviously you submit that payment and it takes about a day, ACH overnight payment that method. Now let's talk about advances. Now in order for the advanced functionality to work, the dealer or retailer that is offering CFAs input financing also needs to be added to the Bushel Wallet Network. And so the dealer would need to go and set up their Bushel business account. But once that's done, Bushel could enable them to receive these advanced requests, which is allowing the farmer to now self-service a lot more than maybe they do today. So instead of a farmer picking up the phone and trying to get ahold of somebody, maybe he's up late midnight tonight and decides, you know what I need, I should probably go pay my invoices. He goes into the application with the Agribusiness. This would be our customer portal that we offer to the Agribusinesses. And he sees his list of invoices. He selects his invoices, he clicks make a payment, and then when he's making that payment, he can choose which method he wants to use for that transaction. Does he wanna pay from the Bushel business account, attached bank account, or does he wanna pay from one of his tranches with CFA? Now if you're a dealer, you're probably wondering, okay, that's cool, but how do we know that they're using it for the right programs? Right? They shouldn't be buying fuel with their seed tranche. And that's where the dealer's experience then comes in. So once that user has initiated in advance to pay for those invoices with a particular tranche, the certified lender at the dealer or the retailer would get an email from CFA saying that a new advance request has been submitted by the grower. They can then log in to their dealer portal or what CFA calls their field finance. They go in, they go to the advanced approval queue, which is a new tab for CFA. And then they can see the list of transactions that the customer has initiated. And then they can choose to either approve, deny or even edit the tranche to change it to the correct tranche in the case that the farmer chose the wrong tranche for that transaction. So with CFA, loans display as they do today in the CFA dealer portal. So the retailer, there's no change there to the loan application process or you're then being able to go and view the loans. But now the borrower with Bushel, the Bushel business account, they can now do all of these things self-service. They can attach their loan, they can view their loan information, and they can make payments. And if the the dealer is in the Wallet Network, they're able to initiate loan advances. So that would help reduce a lot of phone calls, you know, a lot of extra interest maybe that the farmers being charged when they're making a payment, but they're making it via paper check. They can now make it much faster, reducing the amount of time that they're being charged interest. They can view that loan information. They don't have to call the dealer and say, hey, can you remind me again what loans do I have? What dollar amounts, etcetera? It's all right there within the application. And then on the retailer side, there would be that advanced request screen within the CFA dealer portal for anyone that is utilizing the advanced request service that we provide. So how do you reach out to Bushel? If you're interested, if you're a retailer and you'd like to get set up with our Bushel Pay technology, or if you're a borrower and you wanna connect up your loan, you can check us out at bushelpowered dot com. That's the website. You can go check it out. And one thing to note again, to the farmer, there's no fee. On the retailer side, if you do do the advanced request piece, there is a small fee on the advanced request side, but otherwise it's a free service for the farmer to use and the retailer can offer this to their borrowers in order to see their loan and pay it back for free as well. Looks like we have some questions coming in. How critical is it gonna be in the future to be able to take payment via card or other payment methods rather than just ACH online or via check? I have not seen the rest of that question. The font needs to be smaller. I'll answer the don't know. Doug, why don't you take the first crack at the first question? I think it's a really interesting question because, you know, the payment industry, the electronic payment industry, not agriculture payment industry, but electronic payment industry is seeing a seismic shift. Well, there's there there are several things. You know, one is the, you know, the ongoing limit issue, you know, where the way that those those things like Venmo and and Visa and other things are built is their their fees that are that are pretty high to begin with don't seem all that bad when you're talking about a few hundred dollars here and there. On purchases, you know, your fees are, you know, a dollar or two. When you get to those large loan, large volume transactions, fees become very prohibitive. And I I mentioned that earlier, I'm you know, I think that's one thing we should all keep in mind. The other thing is the payment industry itself, the technology is changing so quickly. You know, there's there's obviously been a lot of talk about things like, you know, crypto as a as a replacement for, you know, cash based transactions and how's that gonna look. And I think until we get to a, you know, kind of a stable coin marketplace, we're that's probably still just a a more of a intellectual exercise than it is an actual business conversation. I think, you know, being at the the root of the question, how critical is it going to be to to be able to take those payments? I think it's it's critical for all businesses to be able to to to do business with their customers where they're at. I mean, if a customer wants to present you a payment in in a card form, then it's your responsibility to to have the technology to accept that. I think it's it's quite simple in that sense. Yeah. I was gonna say something along those lines as well to say, you their goal is to pay you and your goal is to get paid. And so, however they wanna pay, you wanna be able to accept that payment as much as possible. And that's where, you know, Bushel business account, you can connect your additional bank accounts, you can connect your operating line of credit, your input financing. Being able to use have all of your different ways of making payment right there at your fingertips at the point of sale. That's what we're trying to do here at Bushel. So we don't care how you pay. It's just we want you to be able to pay so that the the retailer gets paid, the farmer gets that off their books, and, you know, everyone's everyone's happy. Right? And they get the product that they're looking for. Are there other questions that have come in? Typical onboarding time. If I wanna sign up today, how long does it realistically take before their farmers are actually seeing their CFA loan details in the in the portal? So any borrower today to could go and create a Bushel Farm account. And once that's done, they could go and create a Bushel Business account. And once that is done, they can then go and attach their CFA loan by entering in their loan number. All of that can be done online, probably would take five minutes, maybe ten at most, depending on the structure of your business to go and set those accounts up and be able to connect in to be able to set up those accounts and then be able to attach your loan. And once that loan is approved, you can then view it. So if you want an agribusiness and you wanna integrate with us, that's obviously a different question. We do have integrations with, I think, sixteen or seventeen, maybe more than that, ERPs in the agricultural space. So you would just need to talk with one of our representatives, get that integration set up. We're pulling in the information, then they can see their invoices, and then you could turn on our our Bushel Pay technologies right within that application. If you are in our existing agribusiness working with us, reach out to us today. All you have to do to turn on the Bushel Pay technologies is set up your own Bushel Business account. Once that's done, we can enable all of the the payment flows within the application that I just showed. Right? Paying with a Bushel business account, bank account, your input financing, paying with a card, all that would be enabled for you within the application. Any other questions? Doug, how do you view this integration, and and what do you think that means for your retailers and for your borrowers? Good question. I'd be remiss as a leader to to not give credit for the integration to to our technical team. You know, we have we have an amazing engineering team. We do a lot of very complex tasks to to do integrations across all of the partner channels. I'd also probably be remiss if I didn't give a a special shout out to to Nathan and the and the entirety of the Bushel staff and the and the team there. Again, when we first joined forces, it's very important for me to have like to like conversations. It's difficult when you're talking about legacy systems and people who who really struggle to to integrate modern technology. So it's been a it's been a really, really fun partnership, honestly, along the way. You know, I think that the impact to to our customers again is, you know, we we try to you know, from a from a business standpoint, from, you know, from my operational view plus my technical I am constantly vacillating between, you know, what's what's convenience and what's secure. And that's and there's a there's a really important distinction there because, you know, convenience often means, sacrificing security because you wanna get there fast and you wanna make things easy for people. But for us, we have to remember that, you know, we're talking about, you know, very sensitive information, not only from, you know, personal, but also from from business habits. And and it's also incredibly sensitive information because, you know, we do we we do actually move money around. So I think the, you know, the integration for me has has been a really interesting balance between those two things. And and I think that's probably one of the strengths of the marketplace is, you know, being able to provide something that is that is easy to use owned by the system. That's actually really important. You know, going back to the question about, you know, taking things like Venmo and Visa and all these other things, they're not in the system. They're not interested in what's best for farm credit system. They're interested in what's best for their bottom line. And I think from an operational standpoint, I think it's really important that we remember that that is also part of this offering and this integration is that we're doing what's best for our Grovers and our dealer networks. Yeah. I should do a huge shout out too. I worked really closely with your technical team. I think we it took a little longer than maybe we had hoped or thought initially. I think we learned a lot along the way, both sides, which was a lot of fun to work through together. Shout out to our team for sure. Our technical team, top notch job, getting this done. We've integrated with other lenders in the past, but you are obviously very unique with the input financing and all the things that come with that and the tranches and and stuff. So it's, it's been a pleasure working with your team as well. We're excited to roll this out. Again, if people wanna know learn more, you can check out bushel power dot com. You can reach out on the contact forms there to get, somebody to to chat with you. We'd love to get more agribusinesses going live with both this functionality but also our customer portal. And if you're a borrower, we'd love to help you manage your finances and make things flow, Right? That's ultimately the goal here at Bushel is we wanna make things flow. And so if you can do everything at the the tip of your fingertips right within your app, you know, right within your phone, that's a good day here at Bushel. And so we wanna help everyone be able to do that more, get rid of the paper check, all the fraud issues that come with that, and make things just easy and convenient for everyone involved. So, Doug, I wanna thank you for coming today. Any any last last words? I did I did notice we missed a question in the, in the chat. There's a question about can a certified lender make a payment on behalf of the grower through the Bushel Wallet? And the short answer is yes. So the, we we have the the ability and this is actually a really, really interesting question. CFA does not actually work directly with the grovers. The the dealer network works with the grovers. So our our fealty is to that dealer. So the dealers, the way of doing business, those rules stay the same. And that's something that that Nathan and and the technical teams coming together. That was something that was very important to all of us was to to to hold, faith to that. So, again, short answer is yes. On the retailer side, there's not any real change to your existing processes other than the ability to get the advanced requests. And then the ability to then tell your farmer, hey hey farmer, you wanna pay back your loan, don't write me a check. Right? I don't wanna be your go between between you and your loan. Why don't you just set it up your account, attach your loan, you just make the payment right within there. And so we're trying to make that more easy and convenient. But none of the none of the dealer portal functionality for CFA is changing other than the advanced request flow. Yeah. To add just another little clarifying point to that. For the dealers, the dealer still has discretion on how those funds are applied. That's very important. So the grower can certainly ask to have the funds applied to to a different tranche, but the dealer ultimately has a discretion on on how those funds are applied inside their business. In terms of the advances. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Cool. Any other final thoughts, Doug? No. I guess it's it's been great. I really appreciate it. Love having these conversations, and I'm very excited about the, the next, several months to see how much business we can put through the wallet and and how it's gonna impact our industry. Yeah. Well, thanks again, Doug, for joining us today. Thanks to the CFA team and the integration that we put together. We're very excited about that. If you're if you're on this call and you wanna hear more, learn more about what we're doing, check us out at Bushel Power dot com. We'd love to chat, and we hope you have the a great rest of your your day.