You asked about cashflow. I think our business is all about risk mitigation. I look at myself as a risk manager. You've got production risk, and we can deal with that through crop insurance. I think some significant changes could be made to enhance that, because essentially it hasn't changed in 60 years.
The only area where we can do forward pricing is on contracting. There are a lot of things we can do there, but the challenge we have is, how far do you want to forward-contract? Three years ago, we should have contracted three years' worth of crops. Who knows where we'll end up? In this local area, in the last eight years, we've seen 30-bushel soybeans and we've seen 60-bushel soybeans, so how far do you want to leverage yourself? That extra 30 bushels makes all the difference on what kind of year you're going to have this year, and probably the next year, if you work forward.
That's why I would like to see a market revenue sort of insurance scheme again. I know you didn't want to talk about programming, but the current programs we have now, not just on BRM, are a lottery. Look at traceability. All the applications had to be in on March 1 by 9 o'clock, and by 3 o'clock the money was spent. That's a lottery. Look at the Canada-Ontario farm stewardship program. To me, that was a lottery. The applications went in--and I didn't get anything last year because I was three weeks late. The money was spent within three weeks. There's something wrong with a program when it gets taken up that quickly. It ends up that you've got neighbours who are still competing for the same piece of dirt, trying to do the same thing, but one person, through the lottery, ended up with $30,000 and the other person ended up with nothing. To me, that's a problem in the programming. It's not fully funded.
I think there's fully funded programming when they're environmentally sound, or for traceability, or this sort of thing; that should be the case. But I would go one step further. Having been an IP and a seed producer for 15 years, I'm not sure the government should be in the traceability business. The marketplace should do that. It did it in soybeans. When it comes to livestock and animal production, I'm not sure the marketplace shouldn't be putting those traceability programs in place, if they need it, because it would be suited for their needs, not for the government regulatory needs or someone at CFIA. I think the CFIA could be doing a much better job with what it has available. If it was out of the Fertilizer Act business of trying to register inoculants and soil amendments and that sort of thing, it could concentrate on just imports and setting standards that are globally competitive for us.