On business risk management, I have been in agriculture all my life and I leave that to the farmers and the farm associations. I know very well that it's a touchy area to get into. I think the best thing we can do for business risk management is give our farmers access to more markets.
Our farmers want to farm the marketplace. As everybody is saying, they want a level playing field to do that. I've shown this new way of agriculture because I have different types of customers I can go to, so I don't have to go to one of the seven grain companies. I can say, “There's a car company just down the road that's making a part. We can supply the product there.”
So diversity of sales opportunities is one way to reduce the need. Business risk management is important, but when it gets into the details, we all have to understand that in agriculture there are hundreds of different kinds of businesses. From the grain farmer in the west to the greenhouse pepper grower I was with yesterday, who grows 48 tonnes of peppers a year, they're totally different kinds of markets, totally different things. That's why the idea that we combine federal and provincial resources in one cookie cutter for the entire country doesn't work.
I think Growing Forward 1 was novel and did an excellent job. It should continue.