I'm always reminded of a line in the movie, Field of Dreams: “Build it and they will come.”
One of the challenges we have is that there is a lot of slippage, especially for the cereal grains in western Canada. Only a small percentage of the farmers in barley, for example, are actually paying all of the research costs because the barley check-off comes off the Canadian Wheat Board final payment, and a lot of barley goes straight to feedlots and there's no check-off deducted. Only a small number of farmers are paying that.
At the grains innovation round table, we just formed a small research funding committee. I'll be co-chairing it along with Don Dewar from the Western Grains Research Foundation. We're going to look at how we can get more and more farmer money into this as well.
In Quebec, for example, if you want the good crop insurance programs, you buy certified seed. They are funding a lot of research back through the people developing seed varieties. In western Canada, we're not doing that. We're going to sit down and ask, not so much for canola because people buy seed, but for the rest of the crops, do we need to have an end-point royalty when you sell your grain? Should there be a percentage coming back that goes into research? That's what Australia does, for example, and they're pulling ahead of us on cereal grains.
Is there a firm number? Is it double or triple where we are today? It's hard to know that for sure, Mr. Storseth. I think, even as farmers, in the next six months we are going to show you a lot of leadership in what we want to see happen and how as farmers we can contribute more and better to make this happen. Then we'll come to you and ask if you want to be our partners in this.