Yes, thank you. I suppose I can take that.
I'm a mixed farmer in Saskatchewan. I'm actually the coordinator for the NFU for the province of Saskatchewan. We raise grain and cattle, and I'm a bit familiar with the crisis report on livestock that the National Farmers Union put out a little while ago. This is talking about banning captive supply, which is packer-owned animals in a feedlot, which they use to crank down the bid price of cattle whenever they want to do it. The most obvious example is Brooks, Alberta. You take an aerial shot of the packing plant at Brooks, and you see this modern factory, a very efficient operation. If you back up just across the highway, there's a huge cattle feedlot.
When the packing plant is out on the auction floor, which I think they also own, they're bidding on cattle. If the price goes up too high and they don't want to bid anymore, they don't have to; they can go back to their own feedlots and use their own cattle to supply the packing plant. The packing plant never shuts down. When they're out of the picture, when they're not bidding anymore, of course, the bid price in cattle falls. When it falls down to a low enough level, they're back into the auction barn, they're refilling their own supply, their own feedlot and the packing house.
If we can ban captive supply, which is what the Americans tried to do with their bill, we negate that ratcheting-down effect that the packers have over cattle producers.