Thank you very much.
You make a wonderful point. Farming is not much different from owning a restaurant or owning a small manufacturing business. We're very much the same. It gets back to.... A small business is made, generally, from blood, sweat and tears. We put our labour into it, whether you call it our child, or whatever, but we're always trying to make something grow, especially on a farm. That's exactly what we're trying to do.
This is a perfect year to maybe talk about it a little bit, but if we talk about COVID and supply chain issues for agriculture, the costs of our inputs—our fertilizer, which we need to grow an efficient crop—have doubled this year. The cost of equipment due to the cost of manufacturing—and I'll throw in carbon taxes—has skyrocketed this year.
Basically, it gets back to when you have plans. They always say plan A, because you need more than one plan. It seems like we're always having to put money back into the farm and very rarely is there a chance to have a few extra hundred dollars that you can maybe try to invest in something else. It's very capital-intensive. We're always putting back into the farm. It also gets back to what I said in my opening remarks. It's our RRSP. It's our TFSA, or however you want to say it. This is what we count on for when we decide to retire.
The thing about farming—whether it's a restaurant or not, it's very similar—is that you could decide to retire at 55 because of health issues, or some people decide to continue on the farm into their eighties, so it's all over the place. That depends, then, on how much money you actually need to retire. It's huge.