Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and I thank the witnesses.
I'm one of those people who spent 34 years teaching in order to support my farming habit.
I'd like to go back to some of the things that have happened in this last year. Of course, we've seen the price of grains increase dramatically, primarily because there were many investment dollars looking for a place to hide after the subprime loans crisis. And of course we saw the input costs go up, because anyone who was selling anything into agriculture was saying they expected this to happen now for the next five years, and they were looking at projections that were showing there would be such and such an amount of money. Probably our operating loans have gone up about 60% from where they were before, and now we're back at probably the prices of two and three years ago trying to pay off those particular debts.
There are a couple of things I'm looking at. During the time when prices were extremely high, we found that people were talking about the problems there would be for fuel—food for fuel and everything else. All of the opportunities grain farmers were going to potentially have, to sell into ethanol markets and so on, started to generate some other friction coming from other areas.
Do you have some comment with respect to the problems that particular market had as far as agriculture is concerned, and on whether there are ways to make people realize that when the science comes in, as far as ethanol is concerned maybe they have to be careful?