Agriculture committee  Supplemental lighting has been around for years. What has changed is the type of supplemental lighting. Historically, in greenhouse vegetables—floriculture is a bit different—it's been high pressure sodium, HPS, that has been used for years. Now there is more movement to LED li

Agriculture committee  All of the projects are under way. There are five different projects. You've described three of them. There is also one on production efficiencies, and another one on diffuse plastics. All of the projects are under way, some with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada researchers, so

Agriculture committee  Yes, that would. We have an annual process. We involve our stakeholders, our growers, and we invite researchers as well. It's kind of a workshop exercise. The priorities definitely come from the grower end, and they're validated or vetted by the researchers to show that it's goi

Agriculture committee  Yes, very much so.

Agriculture committee  I'll answer. I would say the most serious challenge is the gaps, because you're not able to predict. If you knew you weren't going to get funding at all, you would scale down your research and move on, I guess, but because there are gaps, you're always waiting for the next fundin

Agriculture committee  At this point in time, the electricity cost isn't high, actually, because it's just the basic cost of lighting and a bit of warehouse lighting. What is going to be an issue going forward is that right now the majority of our growers aren't using supplemental lighting to produce t

Agriculture committee  There are a few growers in B.C. who do supplemental lighting. There's a grower or two in Quebec, as well. Even then, they struggle with the economics of it. There are ways to get around it, with things such as combined heat and power, where you can produce your own electricity

Agriculture committee  I'll address that question. We've been doing a lot of research for the last three to four years, I'd say, on innovation to improve our recirculation. In general, most of our growers have always recirculated. It allows them to disinfect their water, rebuild up the nutrients they

Agriculture committee  The heating costs, again, are one of our major costs. The growers have looked at a variety of things. As was already mentioned, where applicable, linking up the GreenField Ethanol and other plants that are producing waste heat, is obviously ideal. Some growers are looking at biom

Agriculture committee  Sure. I'll comment on the first part, and then maybe George will comment on food safety and traceability. In terms of the programs, I guess the issue we've had in the past has just been with the time it takes for different programs to start up. In the case of Growing Forward 1,