Agriculture committee  The effect of climate change is mostly spoken of in terms of temperature, but when it comes to the forage industry, the effect of climate change will have effects on traditional rainfall patterns. How we deal with those changes is really interesting. The Palliser Triangle of we

Agriculture committee  I just want to commend the government on recently stepping up to the plate and putting a few dollars where they're really needed. I don't have the correct term for the gate that's at Falcon Lake on Highway 1....

Agriculture committee  Sorry, it's the West Hawk Lake gate. When BSE hit Canada, it took Canada as a whole. The world took us as a whole country that had BSE. We had just a few animals in a very localized situation, but the whole country got painted. If you were a farmer in Nova Scotia, you had the s

Agriculture committee  The company is always going to be driven by its potential to earn a profit for its shareholders. Monsanto has proven to be very good at that, at any expense. They generate some tremendous benefits, and they generate some tremendous harm in agriculture. On a worldwide basis, the

Agriculture committee  The first part of your question is why they didn't come here. They didn't come here because I think they visualized that they could get the biggest, fastest bang for their investment dollar by focusing on that southern U.S. market. They are testing some of their cultivars as far

Agriculture committee  I think we were fairly clear in our presentation that there are two areas we're most interested in: grazing efficiency through advanced technology; and plant breeding, specifically of the grasses and not the legumes, because we think that's taken care of already by the seed indus

Agriculture committee  Yes. The work we've done in speaking to the industry and speaking at the farm-gate level on some of the species that marginally work in western Canada indicates very strongly that's the path to go down. There's just nobody here now taking that little bit of knowledge, pushing it

Agriculture committee  Yes, that's exactly what's happened. In fact, we had a researcher from Barenbrug out of Holland. It's the largest grass seed breeding company in the world. They focus mostly on turf grasses, but they are by far the world's leader in forage grasses. When they came to North America

Agriculture committee  As I said in my presentation, we're looking very closely at the need and the value of having whole-farm demonstration farms established, where there's very intensive input/output analysis done. So the farm is a privately owned farm, and it provides a huge chunk of the capital inp

Agriculture committee  On that point, the Manitoba Forage Council has been instrumental in bringing together the researchers in our province, both federal and provincial. We have a process where we're trying to draw consensus on what needs to be done and what we can do most effectively in the short and

Agriculture committee  I agree with what you said, Travis. The key, I think, is to have more dialogue at the farm gate at the research level to find out what is really needed now. And make the commitment to eliminate this whole issue of the gapping of funding. That is--

Agriculture committee  It would be between the research people and the farm representatives, such as the people at this table now, who can say that these are the priorities we've identified, and if you're only going to spend x number of dollars, spend them here and put the funding in place so that it c

Agriculture committee  Well, this is a perfect example of what needs to happen. Then you--

Agriculture committee  Not enough; it needs to go right through to the point where we actually sit down and say that this sector is prepared to accept that this is where we're going with these dollars. We've taken out some of the ideas we've had and we've said okay, we'll shelve those; these are the

Agriculture committee  Assistance can be financial, and depending on where you're looking, sometimes it's policy, political will. We're not actually talking about dollars. We're already spending those dollars to have those people here. We need them to clearly understand what the hurdles are in the way