You covered a lot of ground there.
There are two things I'll touch on. First of all, I didn't slam the bilaterals. I firmly believe that the bilaterals are part of what we need to do. What I said was that the minister can build them, but if we don't have an industry here to supply them, we won't be able to do that. I think the bilateral with the EU could be the saving grace for our industry. They use products that we don't, and it would be fabulous for us to see.
Your question becomes a real business question. In southern Ontario, especially in your area, we're very fortunate. We have a lot of older farms that are land-based. Their COP is phenomenally low. What I've seen in the last two years, from the friends I have in that part of the country and up in Perth and Stratford, is that they've been subsidizing their hog operations with the high price of grain and the bountiful crop. Most of them, in the last two years, have had a crop that has been 15% to 20% above normal. That crop has been sold, and that cash has been ploughed back into the hog operation. One of my best friends is a farmer just outside of Sebringville, and he figures that his cost of production—he doesn't include his labour, he doesn't include his owned land, and he doesn't include depreciation on his machinery—is the bare cost of inputs to grow his corn. Those people are going to survive. They are absolutely going to survive.
Strangely enough, my COP, and I buy all my feed, is less than his, if you figure in the land he bought, because we're not land-based.
As far as expansion, it's going to be a tough sell. I think we succeeded in doing what we did back in the early 1980s, and we've poisoned a generation of bankers to the livestock industry, whether it be cattle or hogs. They are taking significant losses.
Everybody was aggressive. You commented on people who have never been in the pig business getting into the pig business. There is the large one in your area with premium pork. That was an amazing franchise that was put together by someone who understood how to structure franchises and how to make money. He sold out two years before that; he took his money and ran and left the farmers to take the rap.