First and foremost, and I covered it in my opening statement and in answer to some of the questions from Ms. Brosseau, it's the ability for a farmer to save seed, which is not in UPOV 78, and it's now underscored in UPOV 91. There's that ability. You either pay the IP up front, as farmers are used to doing now with new varieties of canola, soy, corn, whatever it is. They now will have the ability to pay that IP at the end, as they sell the product. There would be a contract they would enter into with the plant breeder who says, “I'm going to save some seed, so I'm going to pay this royalty as I sell what I produce, as opposed to paying it up front.” That's in the contractual systems that will be developed case by case.
The biggest thing, I think, is that we'll have availability of new varieties. Since the change from the single desk of the Canadian Wheat Board, we've seen a lot more demand in our millers and bakers around the world, away from the hard red, which was all we would ever sell under the Wheat Board, to some different utility varieties that actually produce better, have more return per acre for Canadian farmers, and are still very millable.
One of the largest buyers in Great Britain was asking for changes and was starting to look at other places to buy, until the Wheat Board was changed. Now they're back. They're actually contracting acres in western Canada and doing a great job on these new varieties that we're now able to produce. We couldn't do that before. There's a huge change in that regard.
You're absolutely right. It takes years and tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars to bring forward a new variety. There's a tremendous amount of work being done in that regard. We've actually seen significant investments in wheat and barley research in Canada that we've never seen before.
I was happy to attend the opening of a new Bayer CropScience experimental farm just out of Saskatoon. They'll be spending several hundred million dollars in order to put grain in the ground to see how it reacts, and working on new varietal research right there in Saskatoon. That's a tremendous opportunity for Canadian farmers to take advantage of these new varieties as well as to export these new varieties around the world.