Environment committee  KPD is a for-profit company. To generate profit, we have to go to clients who have an economic driver to implement our technology. The reality is—and I am going to direct this to the dairy industry in Canada with supply management—it is a very unlevel playing field for producers, if you compare them to the United States in terms of what they get paid for their milk.

Environment committee  The regulatory controls are much more significant in the United States than they are in Canada, absolutely. A spill in Canada will maybe get a slap on the wrist. A spill in the United States will put the producer in jail.

Environment committee  Our first project, actually, was implemented in Delta, British Columbia, and it was sponsored partly by Investment Agriculture. It enabled a 250-cow dairy to implement anaerobic digestion and bring off-farm materials to supplement that. Since then, they've been able to increase their herd size to virtually double, without increasing their footprint and actually reduce their impact environmentally by being able to concentrate nutrients and export them.

Environment committee  We're in a different [Inaudible—Editor]. However, it's fact of life if we want to have intensive livestocking, we need to figure out how to make that work on the planet. You asked how we got started. People ask us that all the time, because again, manure isn't very glamorous. It came from growing up on a dairy farm and coming from that background and engineering schools and generally working our way through the industry and seeing there's a problem, but more specifically, there's a solution and a use.

Environment committee  Yes. When you ask about our solutions, a limited amount of resources are available to our livestock people and that resource is land, because that's how they typically deal with manure. They land apply it. In the example of the Fraser Valley, the vast majority of the nutrients required there are imported from Alberta, the U.S., for feed, and they remain in the Fraser Valley in a very highly concentrated farming area and they need to be exported.

Environment committee  The whole approach to this.... Our largest market, or our sustaining market, has been the United States purely because the economics are the driver in the United States. We need to take a product, like manure, and create revenue from it. We have to go back to the basics of what manure is made of, break it into those components.

Environment committee  Madam Chair, first, I'd like to thank you for allowing us to present. Manure isn't very glamorous.