Thank you for the opportunity to participate today in your study on innovation and competitiveness.
I am a fifth-generation dairy farmer near Brantford, Ontario, and my son is just coming on board to be the sixth generation. We have been cow cockies for a very long time.
Dairy farmers have long recognized that research and innovation drives efficiency, gains, and profit. The stability offered by a strong supply management program has allowed dairy farmers to reinvest in their industry on their farms through competitive and comprehensive research programs. Management practices, better technology, and better-quality products for consumers are always important.
Farmers, processors, and governments have worked together to improve and strengthen supply management and increase the diversity of dairy products offered to Canadians. There are more than 1,000 cheeses offered in Canada, various butters, milk with various fat contents—19, to be exact—DHA milk, yogourts, and many other products.
Dairy research is vitally important to it. You'll find inside your package a brochure that lists all our research, what we consider to be some of the most important things we have worked on in the past number of years. Take a look at it sometime at your leisure.
Last month, Dairy Farmers of Canada welcomed the government's announcement to invest close to $945,000 under the agri-marketing program for dairy cattle traceability and to support an integrated on-farm research system called the proAction initiative. Also in your package you'll find a brochure that talks about proAction and what we're doing on farm with it.
These are all financed by dairy farmers as well as yourselves, trying to not only do what we're supposed to do, but also be able to improve it afterwards. Consumers nowadays want to be reassured that this is what happens.
Dairy farmers live and work on their farms every day, and so the environment is vitally important to us.
ProAction provides to us the best management practice, built on sound science derived from strategic and targeted investments in research. We innovate to make the best quality of milk possible. Our Canadian quality milk program is an on-farm food safety program designed to help farmers prevent, monitor, and reduce food safety risks on their farm. This program is based on the sound science that is designed to help farmers implement best management practices and keep records daily to monitor critical areas of food safety. One hundred per cent of our farms will be registered on CQM by the fall of 2015.
Forty years of investing in genetics has made our Canadian-bred cows renowned globally. We're producing more milk today with far fewer cows. In 1970, Canadian cows produced an average of 3,400 litres of milk. In 2012 this had increased to 8,400 litres of milk, or 143%. Demand for our cattle, embryos, and dairy cattle semen is strong worldwide. In December 2013, Minister Ritz announced that Vietnam's largest dairy wants to buy 10,000 additional Canadian dairy cattle valued at $20 million to the Canadian dairy farms.
DFC's yearly investment in research is $1.7 million. Provincial investments in Ontario and Quebec alone double that number. Since 2010, Dairy Farmers of Canada has partnered with the federal government under the agri-science clusters initiative to create the dairy research cluster with projects that address on-farm sustainability, animal health and welfare, genetics, human health, and nutrition.
By the end of 2018, investments in dairy innovation by government and industry will amount to close to $30 million. That will be 71 research projects executed in 23 research institutions across this country. They will involve more than 200 research professionals and training for close to 300 students, our next generation of scientific innovators. These young professionals are being trained for jobs that currently exist and need to be filled with people from the agricultural sector.
We see this as a sign of optimism for the dairy industry. In 2010 the agrifood sector directly provided one in eight Canadian jobs. In Ontario there are more job openings than graduates to fill them. Three jobs are waiting for every agricultural graduate.
Science and innovation needs infrastructure, barns, equipment, land, and other facilities to test new products and to make our animals more comfortable or plant new forages and crop varieties for better feed.
Dairy Farmers of Canada recognizes and appreciates the investments made by the federal government in state-of-the-art dairy research facilities in, for example, Quebec, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia. Industry too is taking these investments seriously. In Ontario we're proud to say that we're investing in the construction of a new state-of-the-art dairy facility in Elora, Ontario, with the University of Guelph and with multiple partners from government, processing, and other businesses within the dairy chain.
We also invest in projects to provide best practices to reduce the impact on the environment and improve the sustainability and vitality of dairy farms. Best practices reduce the carbon footprint as well as save money on energy. One of our cluster studies found that the carbon and water and land footprints for Canadian milk production are among the lowest in the world. It also identified the areas for improvement on farms to allow us to target our best efforts in a more sustainable way. That's in another one of the handouts.
We are committed to drive innovation in dairy, but we need to keep working on strong partnerships with the federal government, building capacity in our sector, developing our research professionals and students invested and engaged in our industry, and ensuring the delivery of results to farmers for efficiency and profitability.
For dairy farmers, innovating to achieve excellence through such programs as proAction, the dairy research cluster, and Canadian quality milk enables strategic collaboration with our partners—the government, the industry, and some of the best scientists from across the country—to achieve our shared goal.
I'd be happy to entertain any of your questions.