I'm from Saskatchewan, so obviously credit unions are very important. It's the one institution that's actually stayed in a lot of our rural communities.
I took a look this morning at some of the numbers on farms. For gross farm receipts of $500,000 plus, there's only 11% of the farmers who are in that situation. That's growing a bit, but 68% of gross farm receipts come out of that 11% or 12% of producers. I've been on this committee a number of times and I think the percentages probably haven't changed. We used to say that 30% of farmers are viable full-time commercial operations, 30% are people who are working part time and trying to get to that point where they're sustainable, and then 30% are hobby farmers or people who are expecting to work full time and farm. I think it's probably stayed pretty close to those averages.
That leaves me wondering, do we need different approaches for different economic levels in the way that we're dealing with farm debt? We're going to be making some recommendations. Do you have any ideas on that or should we just be treating people who want to get into farming as if everyone deserves to farm and they all should be treated the same? Is that realistic?