If we were at 800 head a day and all of the material was considered SRM, the cost would be in the range of $9 million to $10 million for a small plant. When you're in a very competitive business, that can be the difference between succeeding and not succeeding. If we can change that $9 million cost to $1 million or $2 million, we can eventually have a profit on the other side. In a small plant that is only making a few million dollars of profit, you can see the risk we have in ameliorating the SRM material. Generally, as a large plant--and we have to compete in that--we can push that back to the producer to some extent, but we have to compete for cattle. So some of that cost will have to be taken up by the small plants for a period of time until prices settle down.
As producers, we want to get the price of cattle up to where we think it should be or where it was. We're pretty close to that in the prairies right now, but that moves up and down quite quickly as costs change and the wholesale price of meat doesn't.
We're not of the view that government has to fund the total amount of a plant. As we're getting new technology in place, the engineering, and the plant set up, if we want to showcase the technology, we feel this is a chance for Canada to assist this technology in Alberta to shine, not only in Canada but around the world. In order to do that properly, you need to build a plant that's not strictly just commercial, and that's what we're talking about in having some assistance from the funds. We've been talking to our people in Alberta about that. But we really need some additional help from Canada to showcase this technology.
As far as being competitive, we believe this is the only technology that can make small plants competitive and not have the costs passed on to the producer. That's the key point in focusing on this technology, versus the others that deal with SRM material.