Beyond that, when a young person gets in, quite often they're looking at the numbers as to what they would do to be a viable farm, but whenever they make a move in the direction of being viable through diversification or upgrading, they're cut out. I'm in the tree fruit industry. Apples were looking as if they weren't going to be as stable as other things, so I opted to change to cherries. So when my neighbour loses half of his margin in apples and triggers a payment, I lose half of mine in the apples but don't trigger a payment because the cherries are good. So this type of program is a disincentive for that diversification. I believe it should be a lot-specific or commodity-specific program, not a whole farm program.
On November 23rd, 2010. See this statement in context.