Agriculture committee  I don't know so much about the subsidizing part of it, but your exports are manipulated by what cattle are owned by Americans up here. Mark said something about legislation, that abbatoirs couldn't own cattle any more than a week or whatever it may be. If something like that was in play, then that, I believe, would force them to leave the cattle in Canadians' hands to feed the cattle and not own them themselves.

Agriculture committee  For our farm, if you gave me ten minutes, I could give you our cost of production for this week. As I think I touched on before, when I talked about the older generations, a lot of them who are in the farming industry, at least in our area, don't even have their high school education.

Agriculture committee  Well, we first started on the farm because we learned to drive tractors before we walked.

Agriculture committee  When I graduated, I went to the AC, the agricultural college, in Nova Scotia. When I completed that, I came back and worked alongside my grandfather and grandmother, who were 50-50 partners. In 2004 my grandmother passed away and Corey was residing at the house, so he and I split her shares at 25% apiece, and my grandfather, who was 73, was still at 50%.

Agriculture committee  Personally, I know that in the year of the BSE that we all dreaded, if it wasn't for that NISA program being in--if we still would have been on our current AgriStability--the creditors would have come and taken the farm. The only thing that saved us is that we had a woodlot we were able to cut.

Agriculture committee  Yes, I am. On our farm, we personally have 700 shares in the Atlantic Beef Products abattoir on the island. However, they're only running at half capacity and some weeks we can't get cattle in there. We might go three or four weeks. So our only other alternative is to go on the open market and sell them live and take a gamble, pray for the best that we're going to get top dollar--we don't know we will--or call Cargill, which is our closest abattoir in Guelph, and they tell us “Yes, we'll take them, in four weeks' time”, and at what price.

Agriculture committee  Yes, I like Becky's idea. I've been out of school long enough now that I don't know what the kids are doing or not doing, but I do remember, when I was a kid, that we did take field trips. We would go here or go there, and it might be a day trip to get out of the city and go see a farm.

Agriculture committee  I would definitely agree to that.

Agriculture committee  I'd like to comment on the AgriStability. We have been involved with the CAIS program and the NISA program and the AgriStability program, but we find one of the complications is that we don't get true market value for our product. It is around the 70% to 80% mark. What we get from that stability program isn't what we should be getting; the product price should be higher in those programs.

Agriculture committee  I'm just trying to think how I'm going to answer this. I think the AgriStability programs have helped. They have obviously kept farms from foreclosing or going bankrupt. Yes, we are behind, and there is a cluster. Some of the programs are so hard to read and get into that farmers just get frustrated and sometimes give up on them.

Agriculture committee  I guess one of the things I meant is that if you get your weekly Superstore flyer and look on the front page and there's a steak for sale, it states on it that it meets the USDA standard cut or AA or AAA Canadian cut. So if meets the two cuts, where did it originate from? Or is that just the standard?

Agriculture committee  Good morning. I'd like to thank you guys for giving us a chance to talk. I guess I'm here to represent the beef industry--unfortunately. My cousin and I and my 73-year-old grandfather, we own a 2,000-head beef feedlot about an hour from here. It's a dying industry if we continue to let things go the way they're going.

Agriculture committee  We're cousins.