I'm not going to disagree with you. My ideas aren't always that wide-stream. The reason I struggle with AgriInvest is that currently, as I said, it's a $10,000 matching the minute you qualify for that, so it's implemented differently on every size of farm. Really, it's 100% return on the farmers' money given to them by the government, for which then a lot of times we hear complaints because they have to pay tax on free money when they take it out. My personal opinion is, let's take it away.
One of the greatest advantages agriculture has is cash-to-accrual accounting. We can file tax on a cash basis, so in a lot of good years for farms, they buy cattle or fertilizer before the end of the year to reduce their tax bill. It's deferred income smoothing. We're allowed to do it. I think we should be able to use AgriInvest so that instead of giving the money to a different farmer or retail, we put money in AgriInvest, which is deductible. We can invest it. Let's not just have it invest at 1%. Let's call it a 3% or a 5% guaranteed investment and let the government and the banks work together. Therefore, we'd get our win by the tax savings over the years when we do that. When we take that money out, it's taxable, so we can manage when we're going to pay tax on that when we have a weaker year. I would argue that is what AgriInvest is meant to be, which is to build up a self-insurance fund to help us in a bad year.
I also think it's a bit of a win for the government. If you have billions of dollars in AgriInvest that have been put there by farmers to pay less tax, to save money for poorer years, that's a pretty good indicator that the industry is in a good spot, specifically if they have to say whether they're a grain farmer, a cattle farmer or a dairy farmer. If there's no money in AgriInvest, because it has all been pulled out and they've been willing to pay tax on it in order to help their situation in a bad year, you guys will know the industry is not in a good spot.
I think it's a win for farmers. I think it's a win for the government. Lastly, I'm sure it's a win for banks, because they seem to love billions of dollars of our money in it, both the government's and mine.