Thank you.
Your time was well up, but we were getting some good answers and I wanted to hear them.
Brian and Alan, I just wanted to go on to something. I've farmed all my life. I bought my first cattle on my own when I was 16. I know what the profitability is like in agriculture today. My youngest brother is farming my land while I'm stuck away in the business of politics or whatever.
I want to go back to a comment you made that being diverse hurts you in the programs. I understand that, and I don't want to take away.... I think there are two different things here. One is the lack of profitability in agriculture. I think that's one of the things we'd like to see.
An example on my own farm that I'm going to use, and I'd like comment on it.... Back in the 1980s, everybody in my part of the world.... And I've got the second-largest beef riding in the country, next to Lethbridge, where feedlot alley is. We're basically a grass and forage legume area. Everybody in my area tried to grow corn for a cash crop. We still grow it for corn silage for livestock feed, but to sell it as a cash crop didn't work. I remember that I could have kept growing it, which some did and had crop insurance and what-have-you pay for it, and maybe some government programs. But at the time it wasn't working.
I guess the reason I'm bringing this up is to ask if we as producers don't also have a responsibility to try--although diversity is the main part of it--to be diverse to stay profitable, in some ways. I know that isn't totally working today, but just to criticize the fact that one subsidizes the other.... I quit growing corn as a cash crop because it just damn well wouldn't work in my area. I guess I felt as a responsibility.... I don't want government.... As I know nobody else around this table does, I don't want my cheque out of a mailbox.
Would you agree with that statement that we do have responsibility as producers to be diverse for that reason, taking away the profitability part of it?