Thank you, Doug.
I think there is a place for that. What we see happening in forages is there is a very limited capacity to capture commercial value from seed, and it's due to the perennial nature of the crop. Also, if we look at the value chain, what the forages are doing is they're capturing value from sunlight and they're turning that into protein for human diets. So we're really in the solar energy business.
In that type of scenario, we really need to take advantage of the public sector expertise, which predominantly resides within Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada at the moment. We need to marry those resources up with the resources of the private sector. There are models that the public sector not-for-profit organizations could look at. We could bring the public sector and the private sector together to look at how we might be able to put the research resources into getting new varieties into Canada, and the new varieties we need.
One of the ways of doing that is to look at examples within Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, like at Sainte-Foy, Quebec, which is really a stand-up model for core expertise in forages and grasslands. We also have that expertise available in cow-calf operations in Lacombe, Alberta. We also have that in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, in Lethbridge, Alberta, and other locations.
At the moment we have maybe one or two researchers in those institutions. We don't really see one or two researchers as constituting a core. We really need five or six researchers working together within that core in conjunction with the private sector working towards strategic goals that benefit the industry.
As an industry, we have a strategy in development where we're proposing to bring the public and private sectors together. We would like to call on our resources on the public side to help us develop a model, and we do have a means of capturing that value within the auspices of a not-for-profit organization, for the benefit of all Canadians.