I'd like to look to the future on two counts. On fertilizer, of course, we're going to look at every logistical possibility because we are dealing with a freight grain with fertilizer. Churchill was an excellent option--reducing rail freight, making use of a port that was close to market--and it worked excellently. We are going to continue to try to utilize that facility as well as other facilities to bring product in.
We are bringing product up the Mississippi, as we speak, for spring use as well, because again there's a significant differential in price. We will use every port we can, and we continue to look at our fertilizer program. We have some that for competitive reasons I can't talk about here today, but there are some significant things in other areas that we are looking at doing to create that additional competition as well as more choice for farmers, so we can create that competition.
When we look to the future, and it has been mentioned a few times around the table here today--and I have to really commend this group for taking a look at input prices, because historically what has happened.... I certainly hope that what has happened with grain prices is here to stay, that it is truly a shift that is here to stay, but I do know that the biggest cure for high prices is high prices. We are seeing massive global production--an increase in fertilizer use, an increase in seeds. We could enter into a situation again of surpluses. What we've seen in the past, as input prices go up to what the market will bear, is they don't go down lock-step. So we end up with farmers having to take on debt, expand their farm operations to utilize the lower margins to still maintain business. We were close to losing a large group of farmers. The action is happening around the kitchen tables, in farm operations, and on what their kids and their families are going to do. I don't think Canada fully realizes the impact it would have had on our family farms and Canadian agriculture if we hadn't seen this large increase in price.
So what we're doing in looking to the future I think is extremely important.