One of the things I know that general farm organizations are working on is how to create better business risk management programs to make sure that they cover severe downturns in farm income, but it's not something that Farmers of North America is involved in. We typically stick to regulatory and/or policy changes that impact directly on farm profitability. Business management programs typically are just band-aids to help farmers survive very critical low-income periods.
But what our proposal...and I'm sorry, I do have a brief and the clerk has the brief. It's being translated. My invitation was on short notice so I submitted it on Friday. Please avail yourselves of that information, because it's very clear what we're asking for and it's not a very long document at all.
What we are simply doing.... Farmers really, especially young farmers, have a lot of confidence in the industry. Typically older farmers—and our average age of farmers is quite high—are already winding down towards retirement. The rule change that we're asking for really is more for young farmers who still look at farming as something that they want to do for the next 25 or 30 years. A lot of these farmers are also quite willing to invest in the industry. That's why we're suggesting to at least remove the disincentive that farmers currently have to use the $900 million that they're sitting on to perhaps invest.
One of the things that Farmers of North America is doing is that we're looking for different opportunities where farmers can own more of the value chain. To that end, we've started a fertilizer manufacturing project. We've had farmers invest about $10 million in that. Just recently we are now also ready to close and put shovel in the ground on the first fertilizer super-centre for a farmer-owned fertilizer distribution company. We're also creating opportunities for farmers to own more of the value chain, because it's only when there's ownership in the value chain that they can really accrue the benefit from value-added.
We believe that the environment is right to create more and more incentives for farmers to invest back into the industry, especially with the multiplier factor that we have in the industry, which ranges anywhere between four and seven as a multiplier factor of money invested in agriculture. That's what we're looking towards, more private sector solutions to some of the challenges that we've had in agriculture.