A set-aside is actually an inventory management program where we can slow animals down by reducing or changing the type of feed they get. We have a group of industry experts working with government that looks each week and says how much capacity will be available this week, over the next month and over a longer term. Then you try to slow animals down in the system. You match up the number of market-ready animals to that capacity. Sometimes, as we're building inventories, we start slowing down further in the system. We can go all the way back to cow-calf producers. If it looks like it's longer term, we can try to get more heifers retained to go into the herd. Our herds are at a 30-year low, so there's certainly room to do that.
If we manage that, we create a price stability. The BSE era circumstance was referred to. If we can create some price certainty or stability in the industry, we can start to get rid of panic buying or forced selling. The alternative, if you don't have programs and you continue to have more animals than you can get to market, is that you end up talking about things like euthanizing them. We don't believe we need to go there. If we manage this properly, we'll have those animals and we'll be ready to come out of this differently.
Again, if you can do that, you will quickly see the markets start to move, with the panic out of it, to a stronger location. That really makes a big difference in terms of the losses overall in the industry. Moving rapidly on that...and with insurance, you create business confidence for the cow-calf and backgrounding sector. They are the beginning and intermediate parts of our industry. Then they're in a better position to talk to their bankers. They can make decisions to manage through this. Most of their product is sold in August, September and October through into November and December.
So it all helps when you're trying to manage a problem like this and actually come up with appropriate solutions instead of desperate decisions.