I will give my presentation in French.
First, I would like to thank the committee for this opportunity to present our point of view on consultations on the Growing Forward 2 program. I am the president of the Fédération des groupes conseils agricoles du Québec, and I am an agricultural producer in large-scale farming in the Montérégie area in southern Quebec. I am joined by Mathieu Pelletier, a management agronomist and also an agricultural producer.
One of the objectives that we recommended for Growing Forward 2 was to strengthen the competencies to make businesses competitive. But we want to get there one business at a time, because our vision for managing consultant groups is that each business must be competitive.
What is farm management, which we've called "techno-economic management"? To properly manage their business, producers must make a wide range of decisions. Among other things, there are decisions concerning feeding the herd, purchasing equipment, carrying out projects requiring significant investments and transferring their business. To make these decisions, some producers will talk to their accountant, their financial advisor or their farm management consultant. So financial management is very different from techno-economic management, which uses a global approach, including both the financial aspect and the production cost.
With respect to our opinion on Growing Forward 2, we are more specific when it comes to management. So our comments relate mainly to the PADEA, the Programme d'appui au développement des entreprises agricoles.
What is the federation? It's a network and an NPO, a non-profit organization, that has been around for 30 years. It is run by a board of directors of eight producers. The federation includes 24 groups of producers from across the province and one group from Ontario. The groups are themselves non-profit organizations set up and run by producers. This movement was created about 40 years ago for producers who wanted to develop a position on management to define the strengths and weaknesses of their business. The groups take a collective approach, meaning that this is where ideas and knowledge are shared. So, once the study is done for each of the farms, a comparative techno-economic analysis is done among the farms, on a regional or provincial basis. This is called benchmarking.
I invite Mathieu to explain how these groups work.