But I will tell you what I think. Certainly since last August and last fall, as Curtiss mentioned, prices were really low. The U.S. wholesale price of pork was 45¢ to 50¢, and now it's 75¢. So that's a dramatic increase just since last August, let's say, at the height of the H1N1 crisis.
If you look at futures, which is probably one of the best ways of predicting what the price will be in the future--it's certainly by no means accurate, but it's what we use--we see better prices this summer. We would see that the producers would likely be making a small profit this summer, based on what the futures are telling us at this point.
Beyond that, futures are looking at lower prices again next winter and then good prices again the following summer, and that's fairly typical. We've gone through a tough three-year situation, and you would expect that the next two years would be good.
So I would suggest that 2010 could be an okay year and that 2011 hopefully will be a good year for hog producers. Our biggest challenge to that, of course, is the Canadian dollar. The question was asked a little while ago. You hear more and more people suggesting a par dollar or the dollar even going above par. In the long, long run it doesn't really matter where it is because the economy adjusts. Our challenge is that as long as it's increasing, it makes us uncompetitive. It makes Jim's industry uncompetitive and it makes our industry uncompetitive. Some of our inputs automatically adjust, like grain prices, but our labour costs and most of our normal costs don't automatically adjust. They do over a long period of time, but as long as the dollar keeps increasing, it really makes it tough for us.
So we're at 98¢ now. If we could stay at 90¢ to 95¢, and just stay there, I could see us being in pretty good shape over the next two or three years. If the dollar continues to increase, it's going to make it hard.
But I didn't answer your question exactly, because I don't know.
