Agriculture committee  Absolutely, yes. I think that's what we're advocating here. It is to not look at this as throwing money at something and hoping it will work for itself, but to let us as farmers and citizens do the ground work and discuss among ourselves what we want to see happen. In my mind, th

Agriculture committee  We have really tried to introduce a layer of autonomy into this. We can't take things from farmers; we need to let them do their thing. We don't in any way deny that. It is something we are completely in agreement with.

Agriculture committee  I guess to briefly speak to that, I think that reinforces why we need to have these clusters. It's very adaptive and forward-thinking. I have a little bit of a background in industrial ecology, and a little bit with integrated biosystems. On a very high level we're beginning to i

Agriculture committee  I see it as regional and I see it as a bottom-up approach, because I think this collaborative trust can only be built by starting with a few farmers, and then when those few farmers see the added value they've created by cooperating and making use of these idle resources, that wi

Agriculture committee  Yes, and that's why we try to keep it as an abstract framework for agriculture. We don't want to tie it into specific geography. We want to look at the total field, the demands that are on farmers, the issues they face, and also reconcile that with the global economy. This is a h

Agriculture committee  Again, we come to you not with any specific answers. We're still asking these questions.

Agriculture committee  Yes, and I think what we're looking to do is establish a framework that is reflective of the total field, which is the ecological and the economical, and basically the issues that we've gotten from the farmers we've spoken to, which are echoed across the country. I think it would

Agriculture committee  Yes.

Agriculture committee  To start off with, efficiency isn't the only thing that.... Efficiency goes without saying. It implies something already in place for it to make sense--there's something at work and we're going to try to make it more efficient. We're looking at actually creating something new.

Agriculture committee  As I said before, we're looking to take this and build it from the bottom up, because I think this has to start and end with farmers working together--a few men in a room and who knows where it will go from there. We're past that point. We know that we can bring farmers together.

Agriculture committee  As we approach it, the first thing we need to get is some collaborative trust between people. That doesn't have a dollar value associated with it. It's a grassroots type of thing.

Agriculture committee  No, we're saying we're going to try to deliver on that. We realize we cannot stand back and let government throw something at us that may or may not work. We're looking to come at this from a grassroots perspective and build these networks of trust. Within that the need for capit

Agriculture committee  Absolutely. Right now we're really hurting to try to get some funding in here just to get the research done, because we don't want to be making the mistake of overlooking something and 20 years down the road saying that was the wrong model. We want to make sure that a new model c

Agriculture committee  Exactly. What currently happens is every food safety and administrative burden right now is being paid for by the farmer. We're looking at taking the total workload across, I'll say, a hypothetical network of farmers and creating a position in this that would address that total

Agriculture committee  Yes. In the discussions that we've had, renewables have been at the forefront. That comes back to this whole being greater than the sum of the parts. Certain things like wind energy and biodiesel production require a certain critical mass of capital before it's feasible. When we