Agriculture committee  I would just echo that a lot of the farms are going to be transferred out of the family. Some of it is because farmers farm until they are so old that their kids have grown up and have their own careers. Then they are ready to pass on the farm, but they won't let go. A number of

Agriculture committee  Absolutely.

Agriculture committee  Okay. With fewer than 30,000 young farmers in Canada today and the fastest pace of decline in our history, fewer and fewer farmers will be producing food in the future. We need to encourage and support a new generation of farmers today who will be prepared to fill the shoes of o

Agriculture committee  We actually wrote a paper on this, and I can make it available to the committee. There is farm succession within farm families, but for a new entrant to enter into dairy, for example—we did a study—it costs about $8 million, and in Ontario the quota is $5 million to start a siza

Agriculture committee  Good afternoon. Thank you for inviting me to come speak to you today. My name is Christie Young, and I am the founder and executive director of FarmStart. For the past 10 years, FarmStart, a charitable organization based in Ontario, has been supporting and encouraging a new gene

Agriculture committee  They have the ability to choose between five companies.

Agriculture committee  And those companies also control the purchasing of the products that come out the other side.

Agriculture committee  I don't want to fight with you right now. I don't think we're fighting--

Agriculture committee  No, that's fine, thank you.

Agriculture committee  Again I think it depends on what technology you're talking about. I think the history of genetic modification has been tied to the purchase of other chemicals from the companies that have been selling the genetically modified seeds. That sets up farmers in a power imbalance. I

Agriculture committee  I think they can. I've talked to a lot of farmers who started using GM products and they've stopped, but then they're dealing with the recurrence of those crops, and that's what's led to increased used of herbicides, to deal with the volunteers who have come after they've used GM

Agriculture committee  I would agree with you that lots of young farmers are interested in getting into the sector and they don't want to do it the way their dads or their grandads did. I'm trying to be specific about the technologies. A lot of technologies are helping farmers farm better and be more

Agriculture committee  I think before the release of any new technologies we should understand the implications of those technologies. I don't think we can ever actually know what will happen down the road. We have to balance the future implications of something we can't predict with what we want to

Agriculture committee  Yes. A precautionary approach doesn't mean don't do anything. We have to ask, is this the avenue we should be going down, or should we be looking at other ways to reach the same ends that may have less serious implications, or may have implications that we can better estimate bef

Agriculture committee  From what I understand, the biotech sector has been receiving an annual amount of $7 million for approximately the past 15 years. The first money that the organic sector has received in research dollars is recent, and that's a three-year amount of $2.6 million. So just as a start