Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I thank the guests for coming here today.
It's my understanding that the hog price for North America is pretty well set in Chicago, and everything circles around that because the U.S. is such a big producer. You can talk about all the markets you want to find in the world, but the U.S. is also an exporter, so the price of whatever we're going to be selling in the world is probably going to be based on the Chicago price.
I know hog producers in Indiana, fairly large producers, and they have a corn-growing operation, a feed mill, and a finishing operation for the hogs. Somehow, they just put their slip in and say they produce so many tonnes of corn or so many acres of corn, and they get this cheque in the mail. So they sell their corn for less to the feed mills, which give it to their hogs for less. So it translates pretty quickly. I think our agriculture committee found out before that there's somewhere around a dollar a bushel of subsidy going into corn in the U.S. So when you start throwing numbers around to see how important feed costs are for the hog operation, I think they account for about three-quarters. So if you look at $1 a bushel and how that translates to the price of producing a hog down there compared to here, it's pretty staggering. You can do all the math you want.
This is what bothers me. When we're shying away from this $30-a-hog subsidy and down there they're getting a subsidy for corn, which is technically a subsidy on their hogs, why don't we do something different? Why don't we put the subsidy right on the feed? In Atlantic Canada, we used to have the free freight assistance. It sounded good for a while. They encouraged feed operations to have feed mills and all that.
So I don't buy this, that we cannot put some sort of subsidy on our feed to help our producers.
I'd like to have a little more clarification from Mr. Cooper, because my numbers could be off a bit on how that translates.