Agriculture committee  I'll happily go first. As you know, farming is a capital-intensive business, and like any other big business, whether it's a car dealership or whatever it is, typically your parents are in it if you go in it. We have a couple of loan products. One is the transition loan that

Agriculture committee  If you came in off the street and your asset base, repayment history, and all of that were much less than somebody else's, your rate would be higher, for sure—

Agriculture committee  —and I would say that if you had a sound business plan that would work, it wouldn't be astronomically higher; it's not venture capital rates or anything like that. But proven producers—stability in business—do have an advantage in terms of rates, yes.

Agriculture committee  Thank you very much for the questions, plural. Maybe I'll just quickly take your last question first, in terms of the venture capital side. To date at FCC, we have invested over $100 million in venture capital, which has also attracted an additional $150 million of venture capi

Agriculture committee  I'm having a hard time thinking about the things that we are really struggling with right now with producers. Honestly, the overall sentiment throughout most of the country is that the future of agriculture looks really bright. That's in the livestock industry as well: right now,

Agriculture committee  Thank you Mr. Chair. Good afternoon, honourable members. It is a pleasure to appear before the standing committee on behalf of Farm Credit Canada today. My name is Greg Stewart, and I am the president and CEO of FCC. With me today is Lyndon Carlson, our senior vice-president of

Agriculture committee  We don't have any of the systems to monitor. We have never done it. Historically we don't monitor inventories, like for car dealerships or anything like that, as the banks do. We don't have any of that experience. We don't have any of the systems that would track the inventory or

Agriculture committee  That's correct.

Agriculture committee  Thank you. This past year we were named the preferred retail and lease supplier for the Canada West Equipment Dealers Association, which we're very pleased about. We have been working with John Schmeiser and Canada West to try to find a way to help their members, and specificall

Agriculture committee  We don't have an exact deadline. The talks are ongoing. A lot of it depends on how complex the solution will be. We're working together with Canada West to hopefully find something that's suitable.

Agriculture committee  Sure. Our mandate is to be a self-sustaining crown corporation, so we no longer only take on deals that the banks or credit unions are not interested in. That was done many years ago, and as I mentioned before, we went bankrupt. Our mandate is to be competitive. I would say tha

Agriculture committee  Yes.

Agriculture committee  We don't do any of that business.

Agriculture committee  Thank you. Historically, many years ago FCC was a lender of last resort, and in fact, they went under and got a large capital injection from the federal government. At that time the government requested that FCC be a self-sustaining crown corporation and be competitive in the ma

Agriculture committee  Thank you. On the last point, I would be disappointed if our staff were behaving that way. Our mandate and goal is to clearly work with our customers through difficult times. We stand behind them. We have a customer support strategy that we proactively roll out to producers whe