Thank you very much for that.
From my perspective, some of the most important things come from adding value to ecosystem services and to public goods. So I think there's an enormous amount of important fundamental research...and then turning that fundamental research into applications that look specifically at the value of the ecosystem services that farmland produces for us, creating incentives to promote those, and then letting ingenuity and innovation fill that gap to try to create agricultural systems that reward ecosystem services.
Things like carbon credits, I think, are an extremely important part of a way of promoting land management practices that don't result in high levels of carbon dioxide coming off. Similarly, putting values on clean water will be a significant way of incentivizing technologies that reduce the nutrient runoffs.
I'm working with some people in Quebec right now on developing policy tools to look at why farmers would or would not put in drainage tiles and other sorts of technologies like that, which would reduce runoff from fields.
Very quickly, I think the core thing is to look at the values we want out of our agricultural system and engage in research that looks at ways of valuing those things, not only the strict profit margins but also the ecosystem services, and the whole issue of resilience and redundancy within the food system.
We have adopted, over the last 50 years, this very efficient system that seems to have very little resilience within it. I think we need ways of identifying the value of resilience and then promoting that through policy initiatives. It's those sorts of instruments that I would aim for.