On the farm families options program, as you know, it is a two-year pilot program. We are in the second year of the pilot. The decision to limit it in the second year was actually not made very lightly at all and was made with a lot of stakeholder input. A lot of producers, actually, were questioning the program.
The program was designed as a two-year pilot to test it out. With the second year, and by limiting the second year to the same participants, we are still going to be able to do exactly what we had intended to do, which is to evaluate the intent of the pilot and see if it does work in terms of allowing producers with that additional money to be able to take advantage of some of the renewal programming to supplement their income in future years. So we will still be monitoring the results after the second year of the program to see if it did help, and we will be providing an analysis. We are also bringing in an external board to review all of this, so it won't be done just in-house.
In terms of the second year and the pro-rating, basically in the first year, in the Treasury Board submission and when it went through, it was already identified that the second year would be reduced by 25%. But in the letter that we sent to producers, we also told them that the second year would be reduced and that would be defined at a further date. That was at the very first point.
The 50% went out because it's a voted amount of money, so we can't exceed that amount. We have received all of our applications and we've processed 99%, so we do have some money now to go back and do the second payment. So the producers will get more than the 50%, and we will start that second payment shortly.
On the $3.3 billion of loans—and that is referring to all the changes we made with the AMPA, the Agricultural Marketing Programs Act, thanks to all your help in processing that very quickly—what that will cost us is approximately $22 million more in terms of potential defaults or interest adjustments. That is on top of the actual cost of the AMPA, because as you know from the last committee hearing concerning the livestock, a lot of the emphasis was that the program is there, but with some modifications it could actually be more responsive. So using the dollars of the two allows us to provide a more responsive program.