Thank you very much.
Although the first one was very personal as well, the second one involved me, involved my farm.
Five years ago we had a devastating barn fire. We lost 57 cows in that fire. That represented not just my family's lifetime but also my wife's. The farm is in my wife's family, the family farm. It represented the culmination of 50 years of work by her father and her mother on the farm, and that of her grandparents, who started the farm. When something like that happens, you have no idea the effect it has on you, on your family, your direct family, my son, my daughters, my wife.
Then you compound that. Two years after that fire, while rebuilding the barn—we built it ourselves—I fell off the roof of the barn. I broke three vertebrae in my back and broke my pelvis in five places. I spent three months hospitalized with an external fixator, with rods drilled through me, not being able to work on the farm, not being able to get home and not being able to be there to support my family.
Farmers are constantly faced with these multiple events that. It's not just the one event. It's the multitude of events. It's year after year of constantly being barraged. One year it's a drought. The next year it's too wet. The year after that, pests come through. The year after that, it's a barn fire. The year after that, you fall off the roof.
This has a terrible effect, a very heavy effect on the mental health of our farmers. We're less than 2% of the population, and we have to feed the other 98%. We're constantly being told to suck it up.