I'm not a plant breeder. I guess I would say that the rules you have around research and who's going to benefit might change the direction of what you look for. For example, if you're working for a chemical company and they say “Fight wild oats”, what do you want? You want to be able to spray it when it's this big to this big: you want a wider window. You want it mixable. You want it “rainfast” right away.
If you turned it over to a public researcher, they might look at a totally different direction—i.e., what could I do biologically to make it grow so that once you do that it's not hard to control? It's the dormancy that you have to break.
So the whole field of what you look for can change in public versus private research. In private research you must get dollars, because we expect a return on investment.
There are these big returns to public investment. All the research documentation about it, by Julian Alston and other people who study it, says that there are big benefits, yet governments choose to cut back.
In terms of organic, I haven't tried to take a look at it, but let's recognize places like China, where they do things quite intensively. For years they didn't even have any chemicals, and they managed to feed a lot of people in a relatively sustainable manner.
Does our farm rely on chemicals? Absolutely, because right now those are the recipes you use. Do other people, like Stewart Wells and others, learn how to get around it and produce effectively? Absolutely. I don't think it's an either/or situation.
I think you should recognize what consumers want. Some want organic products. Some want non-GMO products.
When I was talking with some of the people in the GM industry, I said, you know, if you look at history, it's always been the hog producer or the cattle producer with the poorest quality who never wanted the grading system so that their product was identified.
So with GM and not labelling, based on history, they're on the wrong side of history. They have the quality that consumers like least.
I think this issue will be coming back in the Canadian economy.