Again, good afternoon.
We do apologize for not being there in person, the reason being that Mr. Mol and I are both farmers, and we're running about three weeks behind in our soybean harvest because of all the rain we've had in October. We could not take the chance of being away if today happened to be fine--which, of course, it isn't again.
Anyway, the reason we're doing a joint presentation is that the Island Grains and Protein Council is a full member of the Atlantic Grains Council, so we wanted to make the presentations together. David and I will be going back and forth as we go through this.
My name is Allan Ling. I'm a farmer from the central Queens area, and chairman of the Atlantic Grains Council. We grow a variety of crops on our farm, milling wheat being one of them. Of course, in the last two years, none of our wheat has made grade because of the DON-level fusarium head blight.
With us today is our executive director of the Atlantic Grains Council, Monique McTiernan. She is bilingual, so if there are any questions in French, that's fine. She's our executive director who works out of Moncton.
Again, thank you for the opportunity to present our case on this very important disease that has hit our region as well as other parts of Canada.
I'll just give you a little bit of history on the Atlantic Grains Council. It was incorporated back in 1984. Basically, it's the only regional voice to lobby and represent grain and oilseed producers in the region. The council is run for producers by producers. We're made up of some five full members and a bunch of associate members. We have been involved in a little bit of research and in the production and marketing of grain and oilseeds.
For the last 30 years, the council has been working together with farm members in building a strong grain and oilseed industry for the Maritimes. We take great pride in having redeveloped the milling wheat industry, which at one time in this region was quite stagnant—quite dead, actually—but has come back quite well. We have local mills, including Dover Mills in Halifax, with a capacity in excess of 100,000 tonnes a year, which we would like to be able to fill with a lot of our products.
Just to give you a bit of history of our milling wheat industy, you have to bear in mind that the Maritimes region is very small compared with Saskatchewan; but at the same time, it's very, very important to this region, to our industry, and to the economy of the region as well. Since the demise of the livestock industry in the Maritimes, particularly the last two or three years, producers have been looking at another crop to work into a rotation rather than, let's say, barley. So the milling wheat looked like a pretty good example. Thus our industry has grown from 2004 to 2009 by approximately 50%. We came from 14,400 acres up to in excess of 28,000 acres in 2009.
The problem we're facing now is that producers are going to be turning away because of the problems we've had in trying to make grade. One of the problems producers are facing is a bit of inconsistency in the testing of the finished product. We send a result or test, let's say, to the P.E.I. Grain Elevators Corporation, and then the same test could go to another company, and different results come back.
So we have some pretty major problems that we want to get to work on. The Atlantic Grains Council, we think, has been leading the way in that.
At this point I'm going to stop for a few minutes and turn it over to David, and I'll let David introduce himself.