What we need is more funding in this area, to begin with, and my suggestion is that producers get involved, with government help, in essentially setting up venture capital types of funds or angel investment types of funds, developing business plans, and doing all the smart things involved in starting up a new business so that we can process it locally.
I'll give you a very simple example. I take students through the U.S. Midwest to see some innovative farms. There's a farmer in the Midwest who grows corn, but he realized he could get more money for his corn by drying it and flaking it, rather like cornflakes, so he set up a little steaming system on his farm. The corn is for animal feed, and the digestibility increases if you steam it and flake it. Now he has all sorts of producers selling him his corn, and it's a central processing facility.
This is one farmer who had an idea, but it required about $2 million in capital funding to do that, and the money had to come from someone. Someone has to take that risk along the way, and even though we have small markets here, I think there is a role for government in that area.
Perhaps I could go a little bit further on this aspect. I lived in Silicon Valley in the U.S. for about seven years, so I saw a lot of venture capital funding. I saw Google being formed in front of my eyes; in fact, one of the stupidest things I've done in my life was to not respond to an email offer to work for Google for $50 an hour when it had 10 employees. I wouldn't be here in front of you today.
Where does all that money for lot of the long-term funding come from in the U.S? It comes from the U.S. military, through DARPA. I'm Canadian, but some of my microbial research when I lived in California was funded by the U.S. military. DARPA is the name of the organization. Although the U.S. might say that the government doesn't fund certain things, well, the U.S. military does. It provides huge amounts of money in long-term funding.