Good morning, and welcome to everyone here today.
In terms of different kinds of farming, in my mind I slot things into two or three categories. Certainly there's the supply managed sector, produced commodities, and then there are other, what I will call mainstream commodity producers, whether it's beef or grain. Then there's lots of other stuff. I don't know whether we'd call it odds and ends or just lots of other stuff. My riding is in central Ontario, and I have a very diverse farm community—everything from maple syrup to honey to fur producers to organic dairy to goat milk and goat cheese. I see many of the opportunities, particularly for younger farmers, are in these what I could almost call niche products or more specialized products.
The question I have—and, Mr. Hunter, you raised it, and Mr. Wiseman touched on it as well—is really a two-part question. Number one, in terms of these miscellaneous categories of smaller products, is that where you see some opportunities? In terms of business risk management, we have the CAIS program and there are a lot of complaints with the CAIS program that we're all familiar with, but for some of these producers, using cranberries as an example, vertical integration and trying to capture more of the value chains seem to be the way to go. Does a program like CAIS work for small producers, particularly small producers who are trying to move up the value chain and not just sell the raw commodity, but actually try to convert it into some sort of a product? That's maybe a yes or a no, but if you have some ideas or some suggestions of what could or should be done to a program like CAIS to help those producers who want to become producers of products rather than commodities, we would appreciate that.