I invite you to come to our place sometime to have a little visit, because here is a company that has 200 shareholders and 50 employees, and 70% of those employees were born and raised within 20 miles of our place. Over 70% of them are involved in a farm, either helping their parents or farming on the side, or trying to start a farm of their own.
So to biofuel and what drove that a little bit, in our case, we were fortunate when we built. We've been in the ethanol business since 1990, so we've been around a couple of days. One of the things we have to determine is, are we building ethanol because we want to have an alternative grain fuel, or are we building ethanol because we want to regenerate rural economies, or, thirdly, give farmers an opportunity to move up the value chain? If those are the answers, if the answers are those last two, then I think we need to restructure the way we're doing biofuel now. where we're saying every company qualifies, because when it comes economy of scale, you cannot.... Ethanol production is very sensitive to economies of scale, but you can do other things like we're doing that we think are pretty competitive. But they're done on a smaller scale and they're done because they're targeted to rural communities and farm ownership.
That's the way it started in the U.S., where the government and state governments guaranteed loans for producers to be able to invest in these things and put a cap on the kinds of tax exemptions that companies could get in those states where they were built, to make sure these multinationals didn't build these huge ones and take over the market instantly.
The reality is that one day last year, a few months ago, there were announcements of three plants in the U.S. Those three plants would supply Canadians, all of Canada, with the renewable fuel we need.
So I think we need to have a strategy that's targeted. If the strategy is increasing value for farmers, allowing participation, and doing rural development, then we need to change the program from the way it is now. Unfortunately, that isn't the way the programs are structured today.