We did see an uptake last winter, not a huge one, but we did see some uptake when farmers were taking advantage of that cash advance, both in the fall and in the spring. We allowed a farmer to maintain his fall application and still apply for a spring application. Double-dip would be the slang for it.
Having said that, farmers are great. They give you a handshake on what they're going to repay, and they do. There are tremendous underlying values that say they took this on and they're going to pay it back. Farm debt-to-asset ratio has never been better, and we continue to see that expand. Yes, there were some anomalies last year as we saw that basis stretch to the breaking point. The good news in the analysis that we've done is very few farmers were forced to sell. They hung on. They sat on it. They carried it through. We're seeing prices start to stabilize and climb back up again now.
I will be having meetings in the coming weeks with the major grain buyers as to how we don't see that type of a stretch basis again. They were sending that as a market signal that they couldn't move the product, so we don't want to buy it, and if we do, we're going to buy it in a way that we can pay to store it and sit on it ourselves. We've got the logistic systems chugging away on seven of eight cylinders, I would say. They've done a reasonable job. I wouldn't pat anybody on the back just yet because we still have a lot of work to do in moving forward on the whole idea that we need corridor-by-corridor specifics so that we can start to analyze why it takes so long for a car to go to the U.S., the cycle times, and all of these things. We want to make sure what's ordered is what's delivered and not what the railways want to ship.
The most egregious thing I saw last year was almost 58 boats sitting in Vancouver, and one sat there for six weeks waiting for five cars of a specific barley to finish it off, because the railways wouldn't spot the cars. That's ridiculous. We need a lot more data—under Mark Hemmes at Quorum—to make sure that those types of egregious flaunting of rationale never happen again.