Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I would also like to thank our witnesses for being here.
I am an MP from Joliette, north of Montreal. We have a lot of poultry producers in my riding, especially in Saint-Félix-de-Valois. Of course, there are hatcheries there. Poultry is raised there, and there are processing plants. The poultry industry in my riding employs a lot of people.
As an aside, I sold poultry, laying hens, to be exact. People asked me why the truck was empty in the middle of the day. It's because you don't load poultry during the day. You do it at night because poultry get a little worked up during the day. In any case, when I was doing it, we loaded the trucks at night.
I have the French version of your document. It says that Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada indicated that farmers had generated farm cash receipts of close to $3.7 billion through poultry sales. That's a lot of money. That's 7% of all receipts from the sale of agricultural products.
Let's talk about innovation. A little further on in your document, it says that no researchers are really devoting their work to the poultry industry anymore. Will the fact that fewer researchers are focusing on that industry negatively affect it?