If you had five or ten good years and you built up a wonderful margin on your farm, and then you had a bad year, you would qualify for CAIS. But as Kenton says, when you have four or five bad years in a row and your margin has gone down to nothing, it doesn't help you. There's a lot of paperwork, and a lot of accountants working for you trying to figure it out. You end up with accounting bills and no payment out of it.
Elk is what I'm here to speak on, but my son and I do farm 15,000 acres, and we know what the agriculture industry is. We have to have a cost of production in the bad years. It's just not insurance if we need it but a cost of production. Some farms don't put as much into trying to grow a crop as other farms, and maybe their cost isn't as high. But when you're striving as a business and you want to make money, you have to put money into your production.
If you have a weather-based problem, you have no control over it. We can go into the futures, and peg our crops on into the futures. Some places have an act of God. If you don't produce that crop, you can get out of the contract. But with a lot of them you can't.
So you have to assure yourself that you can grow that crop. If you have a weather-based problem--hail, drought, frost, whatever it is--you can't even help yourself. You've locked in a good price for your product, but if you can't get it off the field, it's twice as bad. You have a crop insurance payment that you can't make and you're not getting much out of crop insurance.
So that's our problem--the cost of production.