I'll start.
By black box technology, I meant that DuPont has what they call black box technology out there. You can rent one of those machines for $750 a month. Essentially, it uses an imaging process and will tell you in about two minutes what the grain is. They've tested that against CGC inspectors, and it's far more consistent than humans are. It takes the human factor out of it.
As for statutory declarations, the Australians use them all. We asked them if they were followed, and they are followed because the producers police them themselves. If one individual messes up a whole silo of grain for them, they tend to get a little rough with them.
I'll go back to what you said about our being a quality exporter of grain around the world. I agree that we have that reputation, but you can't take a handful of grain and look at it and say that is quality grain. The board and CGC call the U.S. a premium market. If you go to the durum plant in Great Falls, Montana, they'll take durum that you absolutely wouldn't feed to a chicken in Canada. They don't care what it looks like. The quality they are looking for is the intrinsic value of the product, not what it looks like. The board gets blamed for all the trade disputes that we have about getting into the U.S.--and we've had lots of them. Maybe some of them are the board's fault, but too often they're selling our apples into that orange market.
You can go back as far as 1992, when we had frost in our area, in David's area. They sold what was called feed weed into the U.S. It was our grain, and it was classed as feed weed up here. The falling numbers were great in the U.S. It was some of the best milling wheat they had. At three points on that little line--Bracken, Climax, and Frontier--we lost $12 million on that one sale. That's been proven.
A lot of trade disputes we have exist because we give quality grain, but they get quality that they don't pay for. It's not the price so much. You can't mix and match the two systems. You can't use a visual grading system when you're selling into a market that doesn't give a damn what something looks like and instead wants to know what something does. There are going to be problems there, and there will continue to be problems.
As far as our statutory declarations go, we use them here now. There are two durum varieties that are IP'd, and they have no problem with them. We could do that with all the varieties, and we wouldn't have to wait until 2008. We could do it tomorrow if we wanted to, if they would move toward that.