Thank you.
I want to really quickly start out by touching on something. I think there seems to be a bit of a misconception that I'm hearing today on our government's position on the Canadian Wheat Board.
I want to make it very clear that our position is to allow western Canadian farmers--wheat and barley farmers--marketing choice: nothing more, nothing less. That means that if a farmer chooses to sell their products to the Canadian Wheat Board, we support that. If that means that a farmer chooses to sell their products another way, on their own, marketing their own product, we support that. So it's the choice for farmers that's important.
It fits into an overall theme that I think is very important in terms of the future of farming and is very important in terms of attracting young farmers to the industry. I think the farming of today is very different for folks like Gwen, and for folks like Luke, who are getting started in farming. It's very different today, modern farming, than it was in their parents' generation or in their grandparents' generation.
We've heard it a lot as we've travelled across the country. It seems to be that farming--rightfully so--is moving more to where it's not as simple as just working hard, putting in that crop, and you'll make a profit. To make sure there's profitability in farming now, it needs to be run like a business.
I think most young farmers are recognizing that and that's how they want to approach their farming. They want to run it like a business. They're educated people. They're smart people. They are some of our brightest young people and they want to run their farms like a business.
So they want to be able to have that choice to market their products. They have those options with the Internet, with all the connections that can be made nowadays--not only all over Canada and all over North America but all over the world. Farmers want to have those markets open up to them. That's whether it be the work that our government has done to open up market access all across the world for various agricultural products, whether it be through free trade agreements that we're working on, whether it be the opportunity to have a choice in how they market their products through things like marketing choice for wheat and barley farmers.
So that's what I'm hearing from our young farmers. They want to be able to approach their farms like a business. They want to be able to make their own choices. I think that's an important point to make. I think what it ties into....
I'd like to ask Gwen and Luke, our two youngest farmers in the room today, to make some comments on this. It kind of goes back to what you were saying, Gwen, about the way people kind of looked down on the decision that you made to continue with farming and to be on the farm. It's a “Why the heck would you want to do that?” kind of a comment. It's from a real misconception out there of farming, I think, in the public. You hear it all the time. We need to somehow find a way to counteract that. We need to figure out how to show people that, you know what? A farm is a business, and it's something that can be profitable and something that an educated person who has a lot of business sense wants to be involved in. So how do we change that perception?
It's not only that, but there's another misconception out there that's very common among the public. Just to give an example, I represent a riding in Alberta that's very largely a rural riding. All the towns in my riding rely very heavily on agriculture; it was built by agriculture. Yet I border the city of Calgary on the north and west edges of that city. So you don't have to go very far. As a matter of fact, you can drive about 15 or 20 minutes from the farm on the edge of my riding into downtown Calgary. You can go into downtown Calgary, and even though they're 15 to 20 minutes' drive away from farms that are all around them, most people, when you ask them where their food comes from, say it's from the grocery store. Clearly there's something that needs to happen for us to change that perception out there.
First of all there's the idea that farming is not a career that a young person--someone who is educated, someone who is smart and has a business sense--should want to get into. Also, there's a lack of understanding of where their food actually comes from and the fact that there are a lot of farmers out there working really hard to make sure they've got a product that they can buy in the grocery store. Yet it doesn't seem as though those farmers who are working hard to produce that product are benefiting from the hard work that they have done in terms of their share of the price of that product.
I'd like to just ask the two young farmers in the room here what they think we need to do to change those perceptions among the public.