I've been hearing a lot. I listened to Jeff Nielsen talk about there being 20,000 commercial farmers in western Canada and that 66,000 ballots went out. Who did they go to? I get all kinds of stories from farmers about estates getting a ballot—a guy had been dead for three years and still got multiple ballots—and landlords who aren't farming. Anybody who had inputs could actually apply for a ballot.
That's the old description. The people we need to talk to are the actual producers, people who have their shoes on the ground and in their tractor cab and are actually making decisions and moving forward with their farm enterprise in western Canada. Those are the people we need to talk to, and we do that every weekend.
I made that comment in question period the other day. We go home on a weekend. I did that yesterday in Alberta. I met with about 50 farmers in Leduc, talking about the great opportunities moving forward. They're pumped; they're ready to go. They have their fall inputs in. They're going to actually start to grow....
We've had tremendous slippage of our wheat and barley acreage in western Canada. We're down to almost half of what we used to grow because guys have gone to other rotational crops. They're going into canary seed and triticale and myriad other things simply because they need a rotational crop for their canola, to offset clubroot or whatever it is. They're just moving away from the wheat, durum, and barleys.
We know there's a hungry world out there, we know there's a growth market out there, and we know we can produce the best. It's just a tremendous opportunity to move forward.