Thanks for accommodating me. I've got an 11 o'clock meeting in Calgary, so I appreciate the committee making time for me. Also, I appreciate the opportunity to address the committee on the agricultural policy framework.
As a quick overview, I'm the founder and CEO and president of Agri-Trend Agrology. We're one of Canada's largest independent agronomic consulting firms, and we work in the area of business management, risk management, environmental compliance, and production with farmers. Our mission is to help farmers allocate resources to produce a safe, reliable, and profitable food supply in an environmentally responsible manner. We have a network of independent agents who work together under an umbrella and a business architecture. We work from Vancouver Island all the way to the Ottawa Valley, and from the Yukon right to the U.S. border. We work with vegetable growers, we work with large feedlot operators, we work with Hutterite colonies, we work with mixed farms, and we work with anything in-between. We have eight PhDs and 14 masters' degrees on our roster providing some of the scientific underpinning.
Today I'd like to address the opportunity that exists for the government to utilize a new sector of the economy, the consulting sector, to help deliver the mandate of the agricultural policy framework. I'd like to talk about three things under the APF, and those are the EFP, the NFSP, and the SBPS: the environmental farm plan, the national farm stewardship program, and specialized business planning services. Those are what I want to talk about.
I believe society is increasingly going to resist red box funding to agriculture, meaning direct subsidies to agriculture. I believe we're increasingly going to see an expansion of green box funding to agriculture, or funding that would provide support in the ecological and environmental areas to farmers.