Let me address that question. It's a good question.
When I sat in the seat and took over as CEO, we reviewed again the programs that we had, the different investment strategies we had. We looked at that particular strategy of acquiring agricultural land around the world, which seemed theoretically to be a very good idea for a long-term investor. It's one that's aligned with population growth and people's improving wealth and ability to buy food around the world. It seemed something that would be aligned with a long-term investor and less subject to sort of short-term market movement. It seemed like a good strategy.
The challenge was exactly as you've identified, which was that the local challenges of buying farmland were really challenging, not just in Canada but around the world. We'd identified several different markets where we thought we could buy a significant scale of agricultural land.
Everything we do has to be scalable; otherwise the costs we have don't make sense. We need to keep our costs under control and have programs in which we can have a few people and do very scalable investments. The challenge was that when we actually tried to come and accumulate a significant amount of land, there was a lot of resistance and different challenges in different markets, whether it was in Canada, Australia or Brazil.
In the U.S. we had managed to accumulate one very significant platform. At one point we were the largest owner of standing irrigated row crop land in the U.S. We owned a company called Agriculture Company of America. Given the challenges we had in the rest of the programming, and also where pricing had gone, we decided to divest that, so we sold that land program in the U.S. and we have scaled back. We no longer have that program of trying to buy and accumulate agricultural land around the world.