Thank you for the question. I'll make sure I understand it correctly. You're looking for what improvements we could make to AgriStability.
I agree if it's some sort of a hybrid, that's great, but we've been struggling with a number of asks for changes to the AgriStability program, specifically for the beef industry, for a number of years, and we haven't received those. We've asked for the viability test. It's killing a lot of people.
We had an interesting suggestion from one participant here that maybe we need to stretch this out, because the biggest problem with the beef industry is that we've been so bad, for up to about seven years now, that our margins have declined to zero or below, and it's just not working. That's why we feel that a targeted program, an insurance program, whereby we can insure, for a premium...similar to crop insurance, so that we know how much we'll be able to end up with for our product in the fall when we sell it, so that we can cashflow our business.
I think somebody mentioned caps earlier. I completely disagree with the idea. We can't have caps on these programs. They penalize too many of our producers. In our operation, while it's a large operation—it's a 12,000-head feedlot—caps impede our ability to use that. They say the big guy doesn't need money. Well, if you think of it, we're a community-owned group; I have 400 shareholders. That's 400 families who are affected if we have a cap that does not allow us to use that program properly.
As I said, there are a number of issues that have come up before. We feel that we need to target these programs more. Maybe that can be done under the current AgriStability program, but it's clear that the current program has a lot of problems and needs some major reworking, and we feel we need to do the reworking now. We can't think about it for the next three years.