Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I thank the witnesses for coming here today.
It seems like you're a very busy bunch right now, so to come here and talk to us, it's appreciated. We've been travelling across the country the last few weeks and hearing from many young farmers, or potential young farmers.
When I landed in Sussex last night, I picked up this paper, the Telegraph-Journal. It's good to see agriculture on the front page. You don't see it too much. But this was about an announcement that was made just recently. It was a federal-provincial announcement. I don't want to get into the politics of it, I just want to say that, reading the article, it said how important industry was to New Brunswick. I think there is almost $500-million worth of farm gate sales, with almost 3,000 farmers, so it's a substantial part of the New Brunswick economy.
The federal-provincial program was kind of pushing for cheaper production, new crops, new food processing.
You mentioned, Jonathan, young farmers. My wife and I were the Outstanding Young Farmers in Nova Scotia, and we went to the Ottawa conference last fall. What's interesting is that when we were farming, it was all about production, production, production. That was the main thing. But what I found with many of the representatives from each province was that what was happening on their farms with green energy was one of the key reasons why they received awards.
It has been brought up by a couple of you now about green technology. We visited some fairly efficient farms over the last couple of weeks that are using a lot of green technology.
Now, tying this together, you would think right now that government programs--you talked about government programs, Jonathan, about how important they are--should be really pushing agriculture to be the saviour, or be instrumental, in their environment. I don't think it should just come from Agriculture Canada. I think we should be looking at maybe different industries, the environment industry and looking at programs. There was an allusion to Europe and how they are way ahead of us in Europe on-farm in dealing with technology.
My question is probably for you three, and you can sum it up. What programs should we have federally and provincially? What should be coming down the pipe, similar to Europe, that will really help farmers not only become better stewards of the land and whatever but also be big contributors to our greenhouse gas emissions--become better neighbours with less smell?
What programs should be there federally and provincially that are really going to make a difference on-farm--not just big farms but small and medium-sized farms? Many of you might know what they are doing in Europe. I don't know what they're doing in Europe, but whatever they're doing, they are moving way ahead of us on-farm with those technologies.