First I'd like to state for the record that the industry did not ask for what we got on SRMs. I have a letter—it was widely circulated—written February 10, 2006, to then Minister of Agriculture Strahl asking for two things: firstly, don't do anything on the SRM ban unless we can harmonize it with the U.S., because we knew it would place us at a significant competitive disadvantage in a country that was classified in the same risk category as us; secondly, if we did have to move, we would go to the short list and to an outcome-based approach.
Neither one of those things has occurred. That's what has caused this problem we had. Secondly, the time to implement it was so drawn out because of the fed-prov agreements and the lack of clarity—I should let CMC talk about this—that we were never in a position to do it.
So I would disagree that we asked for this. We asked for what was necessary, we asked for harmonization, and we asked for the minimum, and we got a lot more than we asked for, which is maybe consistent with the idea that you shouldn't get what you wish for sometimes.
Secondly, forage finishing is certainly going on. Economics are going to drive that, so we're seeing a lot more of it. Actually, there is quite a difference in the cost of forage versus grain right now, so we're seeing new programs come out. It likely takes a couple of years to do that, as we have to change our production methods to do it, but economics will drive it.
On the byproduct side, there's no question there's a lot of research going on. I've been in that game for 16 years. We've done a lot of research ourselves. We feed a lot of byproduct and have for a long period of time. But there are a couple of things I'd point out.
First, there's some new funding available now, which will kick off a very significant and major research project on feeding of byproducts, that just got approved in the last few days, so I think you'll see a lot of new outcomes.
Second, we've indicated in our biofuel strategy, which we presented to this committee several months ago, that we require some new research. We think there are new grain varieties out there that can help the ethanol industry to produce more but that could also supply the kinds of byproducts that have the highest nutritional levels. So we need to do those things as well.
Finally, I'd just say that if there were one silver bullet, we would have figured it out, but I think there's a suite of things that we need to do to make this industry competitive. I think we've pointed that out.