Thank you, Mr. Chair.
It's quite the conversation we're having here today. I think back when I was a young fellow driving a tractor with my dad. When we were putting fertilizer on, we used to love to spread the chemical fertilizer. It was easier. You spread 10 acres in an afternoon. Neighbours didn't complain. It was subsidized. In Nova Scotia, they subsidize fertilizer.
We had a mixed operation, so we left the manure in the yard, just buried it, mixed it up. But we've gone past that, where our yields were dropping. I took a course in sustainable agriculture from the University of California, Davis. Once we started storing the manure, it was an asset instead of a hindrance. We had to educate the public a bit about spreading manure. Instead of putting more fertilizer on areas where crops weren't growing, we put more manure on.
We're trying to talk about biotech, but GMOs keep coming up. My colleague used the term “sustainable agriculture”. Where are we going to go in the next 25 years, with 10 billion people on the planet? How are we going to coexist with...?
It seems there's a clash of ideals here between the GMO stuff and the organic farmers. What we as a committee would love to see is coexistence, but it doesn't seem to be happening. I was interested in your articles about the soil and how we can improve the it. You also mentioned the green revolution and how it brought all these Asian countries from feeding themselves to producing, and it brought their GDP up. But they're hooked on fertilizer and chemicals. They're in a precarious situation.
How can we move forward on feeding the planet, mixing technologies, and doing what's right for the good of humankind, so that our farmers can take advantage of it? I'm throwing that out; it's a bit of a challenge. How do we go there?