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Agriculture committee  I'm not sure whether I have really good data on that. Our sense is that we're feeding our own people within the organic market, with about 75% coming from the U.S., mainly in the produce sector. Some of that is understandable because of our winter, but we know our export potentia

November 17th, 2011Committee meeting

Ted Zettel

Agriculture committee  I have maybe one comment on that. We have to recognize that farming is not just the same as any other business. It is also a lifestyle choice, and people enter into it for reasons other than just a return on the investment. You're not going to change that overnight, as it's just

November 17th, 2011Committee meeting

Ted Zettel

Agriculture committee  The fact that it's more management and labour intensive to produce organic crops adds to the cost, and results in a differential at the retail level. I don't think it's up to the government to try to change that. What the government could do would be to assist new producers who

November 17th, 2011Committee meeting

Ted Zettel

Agriculture committee  Yes. I believe we probably have great potential to be competitive in the organic food business internationally. As a matter of fact, there is a large trade in organic product going out of Canada already. Emerging markets in Asia, Europe, and the U.S. are very significant and pre

November 17th, 2011Committee meeting

Ted Zettel

November 17th, 2011Committee meeting

Ted Zettel

Agriculture committee  We have noted that for some individuals, the buy-local system works very well on an individual level, straight from the farm to the consumer. The best example of that is what we call CSAs, community-supported agriculture.

November 17th, 2011Committee meeting

Ted Zettel

Agriculture committee  The barrier to many of those is that it takes a very highly skilled individual, with marketing and production expertise--a jack of all trades. Most farmers, in our experience, need to have someone act on their behalf to get into the market. That's where the Dairy Goat Co-operativ

November 17th, 2011Committee meeting

Ted Zettel

Agriculture committee  The existing infrastructure is usually focused on something else, not on serving the local market.

November 17th, 2011Committee meeting

Ted Zettel

Agriculture committee  No, and that's one of my points here. Right now the organizations that represent the organic producer—there are 4,000 of us across Canada—really have no access to any of that money that comes through the formalized check-off system. I think we probably need some help from the g

November 17th, 2011Committee meeting

Ted Zettel

Agriculture committee  Yes. As I said, there are two problems with the small-scale processing infrastructure, which we used to have; we should recognize that. In Ontario particularly, we had all that infrastructure. It gradually became centralized and dominated by very large-scale processors, so that n

November 17th, 2011Committee meeting

Ted Zettel

Agriculture committee  Yes, and we need to look at it by itself, because alfalfa's very different from soybeans. Soybeans only move a few feet from where they're planted, and corn moves a few hundred metres, but alfalfa moves a few kilometres. It's a very different type of scenario and it has much diff

November 17th, 2011Committee meeting

Ted Zettel

Agriculture committee  I'd rather see the promotion, the pull-through, as opposed to protectionist policies. I think we're past the era when you can even talk about protectionism, even though it worked well for a long time in such things as in-season tariffs. They were a sensible way, in my estimation,

November 17th, 2011Committee meeting

Ted Zettel

Agriculture committee  We've identified two things. Number one is some sort of extension aimed at bringing producers into organic production, because we have a chronic shortage of products to serve the market. Typically that has been a role government has played very effectively. Most of the provincial

November 17th, 2011Committee meeting

Ted Zettel

Agriculture committee  Just so everyone knows, the specific concern is that alfalfa pollinates through leafcutter bees, so it travels long distances—15 kilometres or so would be the set-aside area you would need to segregate GE alfalfa from regular alfalfa. Fifteen kilometres encompasses a lot of diffe

November 17th, 2011Committee meeting

Ted Zettel

Agriculture committee  Just to clarify, is the question whether or not there is a market there?

November 17th, 2011Committee meeting

Ted Zettel