Thank you very much. We really appreciate being invited here.
A&L Canada Laboratories was primarily an organization that dealt with the examination of chemical constituents used in agriculture: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Over the years there has been a lot greater demand from growers as to things like diagnostics of plant diseases. With molecular technologies, these can be done now very accurately and very rapidly, so in our biologicals of primary interest will be rapid diagnostics of crop diseases where growers consider these to be threatening to their crops. In addition, we will try to offer knowledgeable advice on treatment of these diseases and what they can do to mitigate crop losses.
The second area of business that we will be doing is research. A large number of grower groups come to us complaining about things like tired soil. We can't recommend vacations for their soils, but we're hoping to find out why soils get tired. This really means that for their soils, even though they are using conventional levels of fertilizer at the recommended rates, the yields keep coming down and down. Growers often call these areas in their fields hot spots. One of our efforts will be to find out how to increase the productivity of the soils over a uniform area in the farm production zone.
What we are focusing on is the microbiology that's present in soil, an area that's been overlooked for about 100 years in agriculture. What is present in a soil that makes it a healthy system?
This is becoming very important in humans too, of course--the probiotics movement. Instead of using chemicals, you use good bacteria, which we still don't understand in agriculture, but this would be the focus. For this we are using molecular technologies, because there are hundreds of millions of bacteria in the soil, and to understand who they are and what they do, you need this kind of technology.
Last, we are looking at companies that are underrepresented in Canadian agriculture. There are many companies that have small products available to them; that is, they have one or two organisms that maybe are useful but they don't know how to reach the growers. A&L has a huge reservoir of growers who would love to use these products, but these people don't have salesmen. They don't know what the market is, and we're trying to link their products to the growing industry, and hopefully with the benefit of all of our work we will reduce grower cost.
To give you an example of some of the things we will be doing, we will be testing soils using grafted tomato plants now to look at the tomato and vine decline in southwestern Ontario, which services the ketchup industry. What we are finding is their yields have been declining consistently over the last decade, and we don't know why. By using grafted plants, in conjunction with the University of Guelph, we are finding that we can increase yields by up to 40% or 50% just by changing the root system, so our efforts will be to look at how we can change the root systems.
All of this work, as I said, will involve molecular technologies because that's how we can follow things that occur in soil. We are trying to find lines that say your soil is getting better or worse based on the microbial fingerprinting that we are about to undertake.
I will leave it at that, sir.