I think what we're talking about is creating some professional roles that currently don't exist for the youth in these industries. Currently we have a lot of seasonal work and a lot of jobs that most students out of high school or even a year or two out of university wouldn't consider professional. I don't think anyone can deny there is a trend here that sees a lot of our youth leaving for other places.
If we could employ, if we could embrace this informational age.... We know the burdens of food safety; we know it's only going to get worse. As the world becomes more connected, more information is demanded from everyone. We have a generation who was born to intuitively use these technologies of communication and information-sharing. I think there's a huge opportunity to create a new role, a new information professional for the agricultural sector--and it's not even limited to that sector, but for this discussion we'll use it for that--who understands the information flows and the administrative burdens on a typical farming operation and who would be able to take that and probably do it in half of the time that most of our farmers can. I know from a personal perspective, my father will write something down four times, and he doesn't understand that by using a computer he can avoid doing all that. That's a small example, but it does demonstrate how much more well equipped our youth are to deal with these information dynamics. I think there is huge potential for us to create jobs in these collaborative structures we talk about.
Currently it's very hard to get an individual on a single farm and provide him with enough work to keep him going, but when you connect ten farmers, all of a sudden these opportunities emerge.