There's something we're doing as individual farmers. Mr. Shipley mentioned Andrew Campbell, who started the hashtag #farm365 for Twitter, which has just taken off. He's sharing a picture of his farm every day of the year so he can get the message out to people about what he does on his farm, uncovering what's behind the farm door. We're not hiding anything.
I totally agree with you on the urban disconnect. In British Columbia, the BC Chicken Growers' Association has a Poultry in Motion educational trailer. It's a trailer that we take out to fairs. It was at the PNE, Pacific National Exhibition, the last couple of years, and we take it to schools.
It's basically a trailer that looks like a barn. The sides flip up and then you have the inside of a real chicken barn. We can't bring people to our barns because of biosecurity and we don't want to have the disease risks, so we bring the barn to them. The disconnect is so bad that last year at the PNE, I was manning this trailer and a woman my age came up to me and said, “You know, I know beef comes from cows and pork comes from pigs, but where does chicken come from?” I was so blown away that I said, “That's why I'm here”. This is bad. Commodities are doing a great job of trying to promote that message to consumers about where their food comes from. I know that the British Columbia Dairy Foundation also has the dairy classroom, in which they actually show young urbanites, or just urbanites in general, how they milk a cow, because they've never seen it done. They even try to give them a chance to do it. That's one way we get the message out.
To the other side of your question about what the barriers are, I know that in British Columbia we were having some issues with our domestic producers using rail transport to get grain to us. On Vancouver Island, I think they were within three days of being out of grain stocks for their poultry, so that was a serious issue for them. That's being alleviated now, but it's basically being done through transporting by trucks, which raises the cost to our producers. That's another barrier with regard to our competitiveness with other countries.