We had a survey done.
Human resources, and scientific minds in particular, have been really huge issues for the seed industry, just as they are for the horticulture industry. A few years ago Dr. Bryan Harvey from the University of Saskatchewan did a study for us concerning the ability to hire brilliant minds. He looked mainly at the scientific side of things—plant breeders and technicians who support plant breeders—and he determined that just to make up for attrition in our industry, in the plant breeding and development industry, we would need to hire 600 new scientists every year, and we can't find them.
That is a big problem for us. We have been working very hard in partnership with GrowCanada and other organizations to build up the sort of respect and desire to stay in Canada and come to Canada. We have a number of projects on the go from those, starting at the young high school level and going right up to university level. We have had campus ambassadors on university campuses promoting our industry and the scientific side of our industry. We bring kids to GrowCanada to learn about the agriculture sector and about the opportunities there, so we are really pushing on that.
We do a survey of our members every five years, in which we ask them about employment, in addition to asking them about what they invest in plant breeding and research. Actually the last two surveys have shown a slight increase. We also do a survey about the ability to find people and hire people, and we are seeing in our membership a slight increase. I don't think we're out of the woods by any means, but we are having some better impacts.
The agri-innovation program is an interesting one. It's not one that our members use regularly. I have looked at the agri-innovation program for purposes other than funding research clusters and things like that. We've been looking at things like how we can better set up an environment that is conducive to investment. We look at how other countries do things. We try to do some international work, but we haven't been able to get funding for that. It would be nice if some of the programs could be more forward-looking around a kind of policy and regulatory structure rather than focusing specifically where they do now.