Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you both for being here.
Rory and Ben, you've just gone through this whole issue about animal welfare.
Brian, I think you said earlier that the push is coming from consumers about what they buy and what they don't buy. Based on that, it seems that this integrated chain we have—value chain or whatever—is a hodgepodge of who wants what.
Rory just listed a whole crew of big buyers—McDonald's, Chipotle—that are not only asking for certain types of meat, but saying they want it raised a certain way. We've heard this from others. This isn't new. If that indeed is the case, should we be looking at an integrated system that says, “Here's a standard”?
My friends across the way and farmers in general may not like that the bar is pretty high when it comes to animal welfare, in the sense that it's different and expensive. I'm not debating the issue of the science, the non-science, and all the rest of it. At the end of the day, if you can't sell them because of the way you raised them, they're of no value to you, let alone the value you'd want to get out of them.
Where should we be in this policy piece? Are you fine with a system that's supposedly integrated but now becomes this mishmash of who wants what from where and why? Where would you prefer to see this go?