Agriculture committee  Actually, it's been promoted in The Western Producer that it should take about 13 years to get it from the initial cross. We're actually very fast. In order to even get something to test, you have to go through at least eight breeding cycles. If you use winter nurseries, you ca

Agriculture committee  That's something I've been looking at for quite a few years.

Agriculture committee  No, no. Sorry. The nitrogen.... It's trying to get better fertilizer costs. Merv is about the same age as I am, and by the time he's ready to retire, I won't be interested. I don't think he has anything to fear. We've looked at a number of issues. In 1980 a German engineering fr

Agriculture committee  There were two plants sold. I'm as much to blame as anybody. Hindsight is perfect. There was a plant in Brandon that was sold by Simplot. Why didn't farmers buy that plant? The simple answer is that we were not organized enough to do it at the time. There was a plant in Saskatche

Agriculture committee  Until there's acceptance of new technologies like GMOs, I don't think the multinationals will have any advantage in breeding in Canada. I'm not sure how they think they're going to make money, unless there are large check-offs that can go directly to them or they somehow bring in

Agriculture committee  That might be a better question for my wife. She's our CFO and looks after a lot of that stuff so that I don't have to. She has two helpers to help her look after all the filings and stuff we have to do. We also have a dairy, and we had to jump through a lot of hoops. We also co

Agriculture committee  I think you have to be a little bit naive to do that sort of thing. The first year, I just decided we were going to do it. I could not get a variety of wheat in Canada that would serve the purpose. I couldn't consistently grow corn, so I had nothing that I could feed my pigs or

Agriculture committee  Yes, I am concerned with those things. In terms of a mechanism to get a clear path forward with off-patent genes, a company like Monsanto would simply have to make a variety available with only that gene in it, which they would have had in their gene banks from many years ago,

Agriculture committee  I'm not an expert on UPOV 91. I read a little bit about it, and I probably should know more. It gives them a little bit more extended patent rights, in terms of length. With the costs they incur and the development times, I don't think that's unreasonable. I think once it's off p

Agriculture committee  Probably a different question would be—

Agriculture committee  I think so. There are probably two issues. I'd like to start with soybeans. Soybeans are a relatively easy crop. It's not a hybrid crop, so we can make crosses reasonably easily, but we don't know if we can actually use the Roundup Ready 1 gene.Some people say we can, while oth

Agriculture committee  There are lots of questions that aren't answered, outside of the germplasm question. As we become warmer, we may have to look at different crops, and not just at whether or not we can find new and improved wheat: corn is becoming more of a reality in Manitoba now. Some of us ar

Agriculture committee  I am going to suggest that Cal is probably more.... While it affects us, he is probably more attuned to it.

Agriculture committee  This is a good point, and I reflected on this issue yesterday. If there are fewer public programs and a diminished ability to train people within public universities or Ag Canada systems, we will eventually have a diminished capacity to do private plant-breeding work. In our ow

Agriculture committee  There are probably a couple of things. One is that in order to get, say, a Ph.D. in plant breeding, you have to come up with something new, and sometimes those things aren't very practical from a plant-breeding organization's point of view. Sometimes they're cutting-edge and so