Thank you, Chair.
I agree. The margin base, in theory, works. The problem is, if you are a cattle producer right now, you have no margins because you haven't made any money, and you have to be making money consistently, at least three out of five years, in order to have a decent margin so that you can obtain some coverage from AgriStability. We run into situations with the cattle industry where they're not making money. They have no coverage, whereas a grain farmer right now has extraordinarily good coverage. That wasn't the case three or four years ago, but over the last few years they've done well and they've built up those margins, if they've been fortunate enough to avoid all the hailstorms and everything else that can affect you.
The margin theory is good. Maybe you need to extend it now. We have five to six years of information in the program. Maybe we can extend it out, and once we get to 10 years we can take an average of 10 and drop out some low years to get a better feel for where farms should be. I understand what you're doing with this program. You're saying if you're a viable farm, on average, we can support you. If you're not making money, on average, we're not going to support that, but the trick there is why you are not making money, on average.
For cattle farmers right now, they're not making money because of a lot of political reasons, for one thing. You can't penalize those guys.
With mixed farms, you have cattle prices down and grain prices up. That's what I meant by their being penalized. Their margins are calculated together. You're not separating the industries so you have these guys taking risks on the cattle side. They may have earned money and built up a good margin grain-wise, but the cattle just drags them back down.