Thank you very much for being here today.
I listened with great interest. Thank you, Mr. Meyer, for saying what has needed to be said for a long time: that farming has become very big business, and that in the concentration we've lost a lot of our smaller farmers, the kind of farmer who could buy two truckloads of fertilizer in the spring and put it into his drill and put it on the ground.
I want to ask two questions.
I want to ask Mr. Meyer about the storage issue. It's a huge issue with buying the fertilizer in the fall. One thing that always stopped my husband when he looked at when to buy the fertilizer was the storage—the proper storage, the environmental concerns we have now, a lot of new regulations around the environment on agriculture. So it's a big problem and it's interesting. I want to ask Farmers of North America how you overcome that.
I also want to ask each of your groups whether you're asking the government for cash advances or a loan program so that farmers can switch over into pre-year buying or fall buying, or to get out of the cycle. I know a lot of the farmers are involved with the grain companies now, and everything goes through one company. It's something I don't like to see happening, but it's reality; it's the way we've become.