Public research is really key. There's just stuff that they put their teeth into where there's no.... I know the minister, through the cluster, has been trying to get research more focused into the exact needs, but you do need a little bit of that “pie in the sky” research, the “what if we did” types of things.
I'll give you one example where certainly the fertilizer companies would never fund the research. We met with an Agriculture Canada researcher here just before Christmas, and what he's looking at--and this has huge environmental benefits as well as economic benefits--is coating fertilizer, for example, with a special polymer so that there would not actually be any release of the fertilizer until such time as the root tip touched the fertilizer.
Randy, you farm, and Mr. Easter farms. Imagine that your fertilizer would not wash away, leach away, not do anything, would sit there dormant till the root tips touched it and then the polymer would open and make the fertilizer available to the roots. Likewise, they can have the polymer sensitive to too much moisture so it then closes up again and saves the fertilizer, which prevents leaching, prevents pollution. That's the sort of stuff that won't get funded in the private sector, unless somebody could really see they could make a lot of money from that quickly.
That core research goes so far in the public sector, and at a certain point it has to find a private sector partner to go with it. Those are the sorts of things that can happen, and farmers like public research. When you go out and talk to your average farmer, who does he go to for trusted advice? They'll go to Monsanto, they'll go to Bayer, they'll go to Syngenta, but they will also go to Agriculture Canada researchers, especially in the cereal grains. In Lethbridge, they like to go down there to the Agriculture Canada people and ask what's happening, where are things going. They're a neutral, trusted source, but there will never be enough money for Agriculture Canada to do everything themselves, so we have to find ways to encourage them to take things so far and then partner with the private sector, which brings a lot of money to the table and away they go.
Those are the models where we would see things shaking out.