On the thrust of the question, I guess if we had done something years ago.... But there's no way you can go back and correct any of this; we have what we have. I think there would be less concern in the industry and for investors about imports flooding into our market if we actually had concrete in-the-ground tanks and so on that we could actually push back. There's some concern that with the thrust of the American ethanol, especially corn-based, we wouldn't have maybe seen the glitches in cheaper import corn for some time. There would have been a bigger demand for it so that we would have seen those prices go up. But, as I said, we have what we have. Imports flooding in is a major concern
There is also concern among investors out there that it may be too late to buy market share. Investors are fickle creatures. To get them on board and put their dollars on the line they have to be assured there is a future--a three-year, five-year, ten-year, or twenty-year window of opportunity. They see that as shrinking, in that we're late off the mark.
Brazil is producing ethanol for export like you wouldn't believe. There's a huge market in Europe. In my discussions with the European Union they're looking to import biodiesel, and far more than we can produce. The reason they're looking to us to do it is because we will have the cold-weather capacity they also want, the canola standard. The American biodiesel with the soya standard just is not built to do the cold-weather starting or even have the same lubricity that canola does.
There are market opportunities that may be slipping away from us, as we didn't get off the mark three to five years ago. I think we've lost ground on the development of new varieties, especially on the ethanol side, such as the high-starch wheats. Right now the best we have is CPS. I grew that under contract to Cargill and the Wheat Board in the early 1970s. We're back to those kinds of varieties. There are varieties that were developed at the University of Saskatchewan and are being grown in North Dakota and Montana because of a little thing called KVD in western Canada. We're not allowed to grow those varieties because they interfere with the look of hard red. Those types of things are holding us back in developing the new varieties.
There are winter wheats now with a high starch content that will yield 70 to 80 bushels on dry land. This whole argument that we can't support both the food line and an energy line are ridiculous because of the technology and innovation out there that we have to make use of. To that end too, I think there are new technologies and new ways of doing it, such as they talk about a cold press for biodiesel, as opposed to heat, and it is a lot cheaper to produce, but those technologies are probably three to five years behind because there wasn't the demand for the technology at that point.
To your initial thrust, those are the interventions I would make on that point. I think it's a tremendous opportunity for producers to turn the page, to not be so reliant on export markets or even domestic use. It's another line, another way to develop products for farmers that will create cashflow for them. Certainly products used in energy today are much more expensive than products used in food. It gives them an opportunity to do that.
There's a tremendous amount of derivative coming out of the ethanol line as well. Some of the sidebars of course are the distiller's grain, and, as I mentioned, lower feed stocks for agricultural usage. There are even pharmaceutical uses coming out of some of the offsets of the ethanol industry itself. It gets to the point where ethanol is almost a sidebar icing on the cake, because the other products are worth more money and there's a lot of developmental work going on in that.