The beef industry understood that they had some work to do and, frankly, the clusters helped their becoming more coordinated by having that consistent strategy. But now it's also about getting not only participation beyond.... The cluster is part of it, but so are other AgCanada programming, other Government of Canada programming, and also our provincial research programming.
I remember talking to one researcher about the fact that he had a really strong program and he had adequate funding, but it was coming from 15 to 20 different funding sources, each of which has an annual report and a final report. Researchers become inundated by that administration, and they are not allowed to do their research to the greatest effectiveness.
That's where we've tried to work as an industry, so we'll say to another funder, “If you're going to play in that arena, we'll focus here”, knowing that as long as the work is being done, that's the objective. We're trying to give our researchers a bit more time to do research and not to have to grapple with finding adequate funding for their programming. So we're trying to be more strategic with our allocations.
I think there's some continued work to be done in terms of the federal-provincial arrangements, because each province has its own research funding and possibly several pots of it. That's one of the challenges. Adequate funding is part of it, but so are the consistency and number of funders that you have to access.