I want to come back to some of the things that we were talking about before.
Mr. Eyking mentioned it a little bit, on climate change and so on, but again I'd like to get the positive story out there on what we've done with regard to technology: the zero tills, the types of things that are done, and the carbon sequestration. People seem to forget.... I think it was 1908 when there was a prairie fire that went from Calgary all the way to the Red Deer River. When you can't control those things, you get carbon in the air. Those are the kinds of things that happened.
What did we do in Alberta? We have a grid system. We have farmers out there. They control the fires. They do other types of things, but we allow people to say that farmers aren't really doing their part. People don't realize just how significant it is and how we take technology and use it so that everybody is benefiting. Of course, we're doing it so that our own farms are going to prosper. It's the same thing with the GMOs and so on, when you look at the ways in which you can produce crops that are going to take less water, and how they're going to more specific types of herbicides so that you don't have to put on a lot of herbicide; it just has to be specific. You also can look at the energy that isn't required.
I go back to what I was mentioning before about the stories that you need to tell. I go back to the concept of marketing. Somebody mentioned it before. When I was a kid, I stayed away from the chicken wings. They were not something I was eating, but any time you go someplace now, that's the first thing people have in front of them. It is a case of marketing. It's so important.
There was a research study done in Red Deer by Red Deer College. They went through various commodities. I wish I had all of the different commodities for you, but I know that one of them was vegetables and another was fruit. I can't remember the third one, but the last one was canola. They asked for which of the four commodities people had concerns about genetically modified organisms. Well, canola was the last of the ones that they said were genetically modified. They thought the fruits were. They thought the vegetables were and so on.
People get caught up in this hype that comes out, and it destroys the type of work that you're doing. The chickens are big now because of genetics and so on. It is not the way.... You've probably seen some of the games that have been put out that try to demonize agriculture. I'm not saying it the way I told you that you should say it before, but we have to make sure that we talk about the positive messaging and what it is that we're doing.
I thank you so much for the great effort that you're doing there. If there's anything you want to add to that, it's fine, but otherwise I'll stop.
