I was quite involved last fall in the so-called record of understanding that was signed between US and Canada in early December, and I think we've made some progress under that agreement. As you know, when we started out, we put together lists of all the issues that currently were in front of us and we set about trying to resolve those that we could immediately, and where we found some issues, take additional time, we at least tried to put in place a schedule for working through those issues as well. Indeed, I think we've made some real progress.

For example, under the so-called Intransit Shipment of Grain Issue, we've seen over 300,000 tons of wheat and barley, primarily from Montana and North Dakota, move through Canada since the first of the year. So that initiative, I think, has gotten off to a real good start. We've also seen, as the Lieutenant Governor mentioned, more than 51,000 head of feeder cattle from the northwest that have moved under the pilot project into Canada during the six-month period, October through March. And that's up from just 1,000 head over the level of a year ago. So we're seeing some progress there as well.

But there's no question that there's a lot of work that remains to be done. It's still a simple fact that grain moves much easier to the south than to the north. We've tried to set up a pilot program under which US grain can move to certain elevators in Canada, but unfortunately very little has moved under that program to date. We also believe we've got a lot of work to do on issues such as potatoes. Also on the whole subject of pesticides and the different pricing of pesticides on both sides of the border, the different availability and that sort of thing. And we're having a number of good discussions now between producer groups, the chemical industry, and government regulators to see what we can do to better harmonize the whole pesticide regulatory environment between our two countries.

So we think we've made good process on the Canadian issues, but it's clear we've got a lot of work left to do. We certainly want to encourage these sort of efforts between the US states and the Canadian provinces. In fact, one other thing we did under this record of understanding was to establish a so-called consultative committee on agriculture, and that's made up of US and Canadian government officials. As a part of that, we have also set up an advisory committee, and that advisory committee is made up of state and officials, including the directors of agriculture in several of the states as well as two or three of the US governors who want to be really involved in this issue as well. So we hope to continue to make steady progress on those issues between US and Canada.