The situation that livestock producers in general find themselves in is that mortality insurance is a very specialized part of the business. You don't often see animals wiped out as you would see a crop wiped out. That creates the incentive to look at price insurance as a mechanism to allow the farmer to lock in some surety.
Of course, the challenge is that in a market where prices are going up, as we have now, there is less incentive to lock in today's prices. As you see the trend, you expect, you know...Chicago mercantiles telling you it's going to be higher in three months than it is today, you're not going to pay a premium to lock in today's price. You might pay a premium to lock in three months ahead, but if the trend is up, there's a tendency to lay back.
Alternatively, if there starts to be a trend down, there is a significant incentive to lock in. Then the challenge is to determine if we have a viable, actuarially sound fund or not. Alberta, I think, is taking some groundbreaking steps to test this out in real life for cow-calf and for fed cattle.
You have to take into account quite a complicated set of factors to see if you have something viable over a ten-year period, for example.