MR. GOOD: Thank you and I appreciate the opportunity to address you on a little bit different subject of poultry, and, Earl, since I'm not a Reb or a Bulldog, I'm completely unbiased, but I heard a rumor that when the tornado came Ole Miss campus, it blue down the barn. They found three human skeletons when they started cleaning it up and they just returned them yesterday by dental records and (inaudible) that those three guys were the women of the 1952 hide and go seek contest. I hope I won't take but a few minutes of your time. I just want to reiterate a few things that have happened in the poultry industry in the last three years. Earl said I represent Tyson Foods. I really represent the poultry industry. I worked for Tyson Foods and tried to retire two years ago. They keep me on ten days a month to attend meetings and negotiate, so forth and so on, and I'm having the time of my life. I'm supposed to be retired but I work ten days a month for them and ten days a month for my wife and I try to form ten days a month. I have four poultry farms over in Arkansas and a timber farm here in Tennessee. So it keeps me a little bit busy. I'm also a member of Tennessee and Arkansas Farm Bureaus and I'm on the Arkansas Livestock and Poultry Commission which is the livestock counterpart of the plant board. The livestock and poultry commission and the plant board make up which part of agriculture if we had one in Arkansas. So I don't know who I help but I'm going tell you about the poultry industry.

I almost feel like passing the plate because everybody that's spoken today we use something of their products except cotton. We use rice meal in chicken feed. We use 6.5 million tons, Tyson Foods, uses 6.5 million tons of corn a year in their foods. They use 2.8 million tons of soybean and we use meet and bone meal in feeders and rice. We use wood products for bedding. We just about covered everything so I'm asking for subsidy from you guys to help us out. Up until a few years ago 18 percent of the poultry in the United States was exported. About three and four years ago Russia suddenly decided for no apparent reason that they were going to embargo our United States poultry and they did it.

For about five months they would not buy any U.S. poultry. Through some really, really negotiating with Washington with the USDA and State Department and the poultry industry and several other people, when Vice-president Gore finally told them they would do six billion dollars in guarantee loans, and the United States would not go back at them, within about four hours the whole thing was changed. So there was no reason for it. They were saying that our poultry had a disease and our processing plants were not sanitary enough for them. We sent them a letter. They came back and the people in the processing plant were covered with blood and manure and they were standing in entrails up to their knees and they (inaudible) the processing the poultry eaten up with disease and malnutrition, but our poultry was not good enough. So we support one thousand percent a science based center. I mean, we have to have it. If that from goes by the wayside, we're sunk. So finally we got that. About six months later, or seven months later, China saw the report that was about 18 months old that a ostrich in Oklahoma had been found zero positive serological for avian influenza. They cultured the bird, they did everything. The bird was not sick but China suddenly said, no more exports from the United States because you have avian influence. We have not had avian influenza in our customer's poultry, high cap influenza, in our commercial poultry crop since 1984. It was eradicated. There's been some low path (phonetic) in some white (inaudible) in Pennsylvania.

For the past two years it's gone down and I understand some low path was found in some ducks down in Texas just a couple weeks ago but those were destroyed. We do not have avian influenza in our poultry. But for about three months we were embargoes for that. So the embargo itself from Russia cost the U.S. poultry nearly 75 billion dollars and the one from China cost us 27 million dollars. Now the embargo by Russia, that's just the tip of the iceberg because leg quarters which we exported to Russia were selling for 55 cents a pound at that time, and with the Russia embargo some sold for as little as 15 cents a pound. So you hog people don't give me a sad story. We had a terrible time. This went on for five months and the price of leg quarters, they're still selling for 25, 28 cents a pound and they were 55 cents a pound when the Russian embargo came.

As we speak, Mexico has suddenly decided that we have to test all our birds that we export to Mexico. China made start testing all or our breeder stock. Our breeder stock was intermingled with our boilers. So we had to test our breeder stock every 60 to 90 days, 36 thousand tests last year on their breeders. Now Mexico has come back and said, hey, you have to test your broilers. If you're going to export one pound of broiler meet from a flock, you have to test 35 birds out of that flock and it costs you 55 bucks. So we're negotiating with them right now. It looks like we've lost. So we're going to do it until next April. Hopefully in the interim we can negotiate them down so that we're disease free so there's no need to do all these tests. We can substitute the breeder testing for the broiler testing. So far that has not worked. Also, as we speak, New Zealand has always kept us out by saying that they have no diseases in their poultry flocks and they would only let us export to them canned or cooked product that had reached a temperature of 106 degrees. That is no problem with a cooked product. But as of yesterday we had to have comments in as to why we wanted to even export cooked products to them because they ran a little study somewhere in the world and found that 160 degrees did not kill the bursal virus, which is ridiculous. We have all sorts of data that show that it does. One hundred thirty, hundred and twenty-five degrees would kill it. And we maintain that they probably got (inaudible) anyway, but we have no way of proving it. But Tyson Foods alone amounts to about 28 percent of the production in the United States. We place about 48 million chicks a week and processed three percent, four percent less than that, whatever that is. So you can see that last year approximately 12 percent of Tyson Foods product was exported which amounted to pretty close to somewhere in the vicinity, and I'm sorry I don't have that figure. I was on vacation when I got a call to be here. I was logging over on my farm and I came by here on my way to Arkansas. It comes out to about seven hundred million dollars a year in exports and we have to maintain that.

So I ask you, please, in your negotiations -- someone mentioned it today and I want to reiterate it -- when you send a negotiator, please have an expert or two from the poultry industry go because in the past the negotiations have been done and they come back and tell us what to do and it's completely out of left field and we can't do it, but there's a way to do it that would be extremely reasonable for us.

So ask a couple of poultry experts from the field out here to go and be with you as someone said sitting next to your or two or three seats back and when they start asking for something ridiculous we can tell them, we can't do that economically but we can do this instead. I want to reiterate, for goodness sakes, don't let those science based standards go. We're sunk if you do. I appreciate very much being here. Thank you.

MR. SCHUMACHER: Thank you very much.