Who says AgriStability doesn't work? After I e-mailed my speech in here, I got a cheque on my 2003 AgriStability program year--$146, and another one for $778. It was a mistake that they had made on the 2003...and I got it on Friday.
We have been in a disaster year for so many years because of BSE, and the prices were.... Those negative margins are sitting in there now. If my reference margin is a negative $2,000, and in a certain year my margin is negative $3,000, if you take a negative two minus a negative three, it gives you a positive one, which means you don't need any money.
The problem that BSE has left us with is those negative margins, and if you have three negative margins in there, you just don't qualify. You have to have two positive margins in there. I can see why they would do that, because if you are an inefficient farmer and year after year after year you are not making any money, you should be gone. But year after year after year we were in a negative margin position because the prices were so low and it was absolutely beyond our control. We couldn't do anything about it. We just sat there and vegetated. We could not make proper business decisions. We could not do things the way we wanted to do them. For instance, instead of cleaning out the corrals, we had to pile it in the corrals and just leave it to sit. That's not a good thing, because for one thing, water collects in there, there's extra disease.
When you're dealing with live animals and you don't make good business decisions, there are always problems that come back to bite you. That's the problem that cow-calf producers have had.