Certainly we don't want to extract a lot more money out of our farm budgets so that multinationals can make a profit. They have to give us something in return that's worth more than we're getting now.
Cal and I were talking about the canola industry and how dramatically that's changed, yet how it hasn't changed. While there are some innovations, the risk has gone up. To find that balance is going to be difficult. Even a farmer-owned plant-breeding company is going to have to find the money from some source, and that's going to have to come from individual farmers. They're going to have to pay a certain amount, either as an end-use royalty, a royalty on the seed, or a check-off, to pay for that new technology.
Traditionally we've been getting it through public good and through the plant-breeding organizations of Agriculture Canada, as well as some provincial programs and some universities. If that's going to diminish, then we have to look for other alternatives.
To create that balance of increased cost to farmers and more net return, I think it's an uphill battle for some of those big companies. What are they going to bring to the table that's going to be worth that much more money that farmers would be willing to pay them that much more? I have some doubts.
In the public press, there have been all kinds of criticisms of the western Canadian plant-breeding system and how far we are behind in wheat. I picked up an article yesterday from Montana, and I see it increased yields 25% by putting pulse crops in the rotation with wheat. It went from 18 bushels to 23 bushels. The Wheat Board wasn't hampering them and the Canadian variety registration system wasn't hampering them. They had full access to whatever is available around the world in that environment.
We're in tough growing conditions. In the last 30 years.... Let me put it another way. I can increase the yield on my farm by double, and I can tell you exactly how to do that. If I reduce the temperature in the growing season by 2°, and only 2° on average, I can double the wheat yields on my farm. I did that in 1985 and I did that in 2009. I can bring in German material and I can bring all kinds of material, and it doesn't necessarily perform very well. We don't get 150 bushels an acre just by bringing German material and U.K. material into our environment. It's tough work to get those yield increases.
As I pointed out before, with the Western Feed Grain Development Co-op, we've actually done pretty well in the time we've being operating.