Agriculture committee  You do have it. I sent two files with my speaking notes.

Agriculture committee  Yes, sure. If, in fact, the reserve falls below zero, the federal government does have an avenue—I think it might be even zero interest or whatever—where the provincial Crown corporations can borrow so they no longer go into debt or anything like that. There should be a certain level of reserves, and they need that to run the insurance program, but these reserves could handle 25 years of the worst losses ever all in a row.

Agriculture committee  If I would guess now, if we were a year from now and we looked back, I think we might be surprised at how many payments were triggered under AgriStability—I mean the lack thereof. Again, that's because the coverage has dropped quite a bit, down to 70%. I think we're going to be surprised at how we have this pandemic and the lack of triggering AgriStability payments.

Agriculture committee  Well, I assume it is. You guys hold the cards.

Agriculture committee  Yes, I would say the government's response to date has been very appropriate.

Agriculture committee  There's a lot going on at University of Guelph and, in fact, in many places, with seed technology and issues along that line, as well as farm management technology. I came from Arizona, where drip technology got introduced to deal with issues there. There are a lot of other things going on to deal with the effects of climate change.

Agriculture committee  Oh good. I hope he's enjoying it.

Agriculture committee  Not really. The suite of programs is good. There was a lot of satisfaction, and it worked very well, but the devil is in the details of those parameters, and those changes make the programs work very differently. The programs themselves, I think, are fine. It's the fine tuning of the programs that makes a world of difference to the farmers up and down, as you're hearing from these gentlemen here, but I don't see any sort of suggestion that we bring it in this brand new program out here, and it's going to satisfy these things.

Agriculture committee  Sure, what I argued in my brief is that this is a bit like precision agriculture from 15 years ago. We heard all about it, but it didn't solve all the world's problems. It's the same with AI. I mentioned that big data, machine learning and AI are going to have trivial impacts on anything to do with BRM programming and won't do anything to help a whole lot with risk management at the farm level.

Agriculture committee  AgriStability is also relatively complex. Although more simple alternatives exist, unless coverage and therefore budget allocations are increased, I suspect that producer dissatisfaction will remain high. If BRM budgets are fixed, a decrease in coverage or subsidies in AgriInsurance could fund increasing coverage in AgriStability.

Agriculture committee  Hello. I welcome the opportunity to speak to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Agriculture with respect to business risk management programs. I have a joint Ph.D. in economics and statistics. I've been a professor at the University of Guelph since 2009. Prior to Guelph, I was professor and chair at the University of Arizona from 1996 to 2009 and worked closely with the United States Department of Agriculture's risk management agency on various crop insurance issues.

Agriculture committee  I would certainly say that if the rental market weren't there, they wouldn't be able to get their feet in the door, so it's a good thing. I agree that we'd all like to own everything, but the rental market does allow a certain degree of flexibility in and out to weather some of the ups and downs, which young farmers need more than an established farmer does in dealing with risks and things.

Agriculture committee  That's difficult. That's non-trivial. I would agree with that.

Agriculture committee  There are a lot of resources out there that the governments, both federal and provincial, have for this. It's more somewhat the utilization, as was mentioned.

Agriculture committee  For sure. Technology has had a big effect on those rising land values. Technology is allowing that fixed land to be a lot more productive. And it is. It's become a lot more productive. They feed off each other. They move with each other. You wouldn't see the value of technology and the value of the land moving apart in the long term.