Agriculture committee  In terms of hurdles, if I didn't state this, my suggestion is that there are more opportunities for export to developing nations than to developed nations. Europe, Australia, etc., will put up barriers, but there are huge opportunities in parts of Asia and Africa. The rest of the

Agriculture committee  This is starting to go beyond my area of expertise, so perhaps I'll address the others--

Agriculture committee  I think I will refer to one of my colleagues here.

Agriculture committee  Absolutely. The cost advantage alone is huge, besides appealing to people who drive Priuses, in terms of its low.... It's striving towards the movement. The terminology I really like a great deal is “ecological agriculture”.

Agriculture committee  Modern agriculture, particularly in grain production, is incredibly stupid when it comes to energy. I'll tell you what our energy is currently based on. We consume oil and natural gas to produce synthetic nitrogen fertilizer to make crops. We consume those crops. Then humans pr

Agriculture committee  What we need is more funding in this area, to begin with, and my suggestion is that producers get involved, with government help, in essentially setting up venture capital types of funds or angel investment types of funds, developing business plans, and doing all the smart things

Agriculture committee  It's a good question. I've seen it as both, but generally I've seen that the truly innovative stuff is trying to pull industry along. I'll give you a simple example in my area. As I mentioned to your colleague earlier, one way of trying to increase the amount of nitrogen that c

Agriculture committee  We already have the potash industry as an example, right? We have something huge to build upon. One could take different tactics. One could build upon the potash industry and all the connections that already exist there. One could put in all the stuff that you would normally do t

Agriculture committee  The bottom line is that we have a cultural problem in Canada, which is that we're not risk-takers. The private sector is not and the government is not as much as it should be. We need to take a venture capital approach, which is basically to fund 10 things knowing that one will s

Agriculture committee  This is a problem that my lab and other labs are trying to tackle directly. There are a few potential solutions to this problem. One solution is altering the root architecture of a corn plant, through breeding, to better take up that nitrogen. Agronomically, another solution is

Agriculture committee  I have two collaborations. One is with Syngenta, the Canadian subsidiary of Syngenta, but really it's through North Carolina. They're supporting some of our research and some of my collaborators' research, and there's considerable cash on the table with Syngenta. To me, the mor

Agriculture committee  Obviously I was partially joking in what I was saying. I'll give you a concrete example. When it comes to cooking oil or stoves, both of these benefit women considerably. If you've ever been to a rural area in Africa or South Asia, what you find are women who are breathing in sm

Agriculture committee  I should let my colleague Rick Yada speak to this question, but briefly put, better research into certain types of fibre or starch that have a low glycemic index or slow digestibility in processed foods can reduce rates of diabetes, as an example.

Agriculture committee  Most of the minerals in fertilizer are mined. The great exception is nitrogen fertilizer. For nitrogen fertilizer, the process is as follows: 80% of the atmosphere that we breathe in is actually not oxygen but nitrogen gas, called dinitrogen. There is a synthetic chemical proces

Agriculture committee  I can't assess the economics of it very well. What I'm saying is that there is a tremendous opportunity, because we have many of the other components that are required to make a complex fertilizer. We have potash and we have other minerals as well. The missing component is nitrog