Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. My name is Colleen Ross, and I'm the women's president of the National Farmers Union. I'm also a grain and oilseeds farmer in the Seaway Valley, about an hour south of here.
I'd like to introduce you to the National Farmers Union. We're a democratic direct-membership farm organization made up of thousands of family farmers across Canada. It is the only farm organization in Canada to be chartered under a special act of Parliament, on June 11 of 1970.
The NFU is a non-partisan organization. Our goals include economic and social policies that maintain the family farm as a basic food-producing unit in Canada. To realize these goals, we work to create, expand, and safeguard orderly marketing and supply management systems. We work to promote policies that safeguard the interests of farm families, and we work to ensure that Canadian food is safe, nutritious, and available to all who need it. We also work to encourage farming practices that protect, enhance, and sustain the environment.
In all the work that we do, we ask two very key and basic questions, and I encourage the members of this committee to always ask these questions. Those questions are: who profits and who pays?
As we move into today's discussion, I'd like to introduce my colleague and friend, Terry Boehm. Terry is a grain and oilseeds farmer from the Prairies, from Saskatchewan. He farms over 4,000 acres on the prairies.
I'd like to hand it over to Terry now.
Thank you.