I'd suggest there is some truth to that. To give you a for instance—farmers are very astute business people, absolutely—in our rural community, there are no businesses. There are some streets that have three businesses on them and that's it. There's the local petroleum dealer, a restaurant, and maybe a hardware store and a grocery store, if they're lucky. That's not enough to sustain our business model. We need small business and agricultural lending.
What will happen in the farming community or the agricultural sector is that a farmer will approach two or three institutions, including Farm Credit, at the same time. In that situation, we're competing with a number of institutions where we always come up short. The deal is competing on rate or that we require an appraisal to validate the value of the security. FCC always beats us on the rate and it doesn't require an appraisal. They use their own land value system, which is an average across the province.
I can certainly say there is risk to anyone, if you're using an average. One section of land adjacent to another section of land can be completely different in value.
They tend to always win the business based on rate, on term, 100% lending value, and no appraisal requirements. We can't do that in our world—our regulators will not allow it—and I don't think prudent business would dictate that either.