Environment committee  No, no. There are a couple of ways to do it. Before you had to have what's called a sweep of 12 inches wide and you actually would cultivate and rip up all the ground and get all the weeds. Now we'll disturb anywhere from a “disc”, which is maybe half an inch on 10 inches. Or if

Environment committee  Yes. I'm on a board of directors for something called Agriculture for Life. It's made up of a couple of farmers and oil companies, power companies, and farm companies, and its mandate is to teach schoolchildren especially what's involved in farming. When you ask students where

Environment committee  There could be numerous reasons. It could be the environment where they farmed. With the soil in certain parts of southern Manitoba, they have to conventionally till before they can seed. That's part of it. Some of it's education, not believing that going to what we call a one pa

Environment committee  Oh boy, that's loaded. As for the “green turn”, I would definitely argue that farming organically is not necessarily greener whatsoever. In fact, you could argue the other way in many cases, that it's not as environmentally sustainable as regular farming is. Farming organically i

Environment committee  To be profitable now, you have to have your land. It has to be healthy. The returns have to be there. That means bigger crops and higher yields, and to do that you have to have healthy soil. We are naturally going that way and are farming it differently to make sure that the grou

Environment committee  Good afternoon. My name is Stephen Vandervalk, and I'm the Alberta vice-president for the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association. I'm also the president of the Grain Growers of Canada, an umbrella farm organization representing 14 farm organizations, including the Western C

Agriculture committee  I think the rail companies...that $2 a tonne was supposed to come back, and they didn't account for that. That's why it was so high, I believe. I think the Western Grains Research Foundation was never set up to get that kind of money. They're not sure, really, what to do with i

Agriculture committee  But it's anywhere; we can't ship rail cars south, even if we wanted to ship rail cars south and get out of going through the mountains and get out of going on that cap. So the whole system is set up from the beginning. We wouldn't have those caps; we wouldn't have all that rail t

Agriculture committee  I guess that's a tough one. I know from my perspective, I'm close to Shelby, Montana, and they have a monopoly there. There's only one railway there, and the prices aren't any higher...very similar. I don't think they have any worse service. It's not better—don't get me wrong—b

Agriculture committee  I can give you a real-life example. Last year, I dealt with Anheuser-Busch out of the U.S. on malt barley. It was the first year we were able to do so through the new CashPlus program. There were a lot of headaches, a lot of “you have to go through the Wheat Board”. This year, th

Agriculture committee  There are a few. There's the Warburton stuff. It's kind of ironic that the Wheat Board touts that as equal to everybody, but only certain farmers get those contracts in certain areas. They do a premium. It's very small; I forget how many tonnes. There are some hard white wheat co

Agriculture committee  In summary, western Canadian farmers are among the most competitive in the world. It is our willingness to embrace innovation that keeps us profitable and ahead of emerging competitors. For the most part, we face good competition in our input markets. A key concern, however, is o

Agriculture committee  Market access. Another important measure to improve our competitive position is to promote open and free trade in both crop inputs and outputs. On the input side, we remain very concerned about our inability to access crop protection products registered in other countries that ar

Agriculture committee  Just speaking as a young farmer, what I've noticed from my age group is that it is a family farm, because the only way you can farm is if your dad gave it to you. I listen to conference calls over the web and video, and if I can't make it, I take my iPod and download it and liste

Agriculture committee  The capital costs are just too high to get the rural population involved in agriculture, and the returns are too low. No bank would ever look at anybody trying to start from scratch in agriculture. The returns would have to increase before that could ever happen. I guess the wh