Thanks for your question.
With regard to the difference between Ontario and western Canada and the opportunities we see, essentially what's being proposed in eliminating KVD from the minor classes means that the minor classes of wheat can look like each other, but they all still have to be distinguishable from the major classes, being CWRS and amber durum. So essentially, kernel visual distinguishability really still applies to all wheat in some form or another. It's just that those minor classes don't have to look different from each other.
So in a sense, there has been very little done to make a plant breeder's life much easier in terms of really making more rapid progress, largely because what we hear from the plant breeders is that the default kernel shape for red wheat is something that looks like a CWRS. They're still really battling with the KVD issue. So that makes progress slow and makes it quite frustrating when you see that on the other side of the fence there are products that offer considerable value to farmers in terms of better disease tolerance, be it fusarium or whatever, or insect tolerance, or simply a higher yield for some of those new emerging markets.
We just feel that there's an opportunity for much quicker and much greater progress, and we feel that given the farm income situation right now, we can't afford to continue to overlook those opportunities that are being held back. So we feel that we need to eliminate those barriers, and when we look at the Ontario situation, at what was done back in 1989, it was that all red wheats were taken out of KVD. Essentially, the handcuffs were taken off. Whatever type of wheat could be brought forward, if it offered more economic value to the farmer and to the system as a whole, it could be introduced and could be grown.
In contrast, we still have KVD on white wheat in Ontario, and that has caused us some issues more recently as the industry has tried to diversify into some hard white wheats, for example. In one case, that product is being grown in Michigan now and imported back into Ontario because KVD prevents the product from being registered here.
So we just think we need to allow, wherever possible, the opportunity to innovate and add value in Canada.