You've hit a very rich vein of investigation. When my colleague talked about the efforts at the provincial level to boost the profile of agriculture as an attractive career for youth, one of the things they're doing is trying to lay out just how technologically advanced and capital intensive the sector is.
When you talk about big data, Canada is a leader in precision agriculture because of the size of our farms and the challenges we face. The country is adopting new technologies at a very quick pace: telemetry for weather, for soil conditions, remote sensing of all types, and remote guidance of all types. Technology and data that goes with technology for assessing a farm condition, the progress of a crop or what have you, are all very critical to the sector.
The challenge that you mentioned, and I think you used the acronym HQP, which stands for highly qualified personnel. We're competing in the ag business with all the STEM sciences: science, technology, engineering, and math. We need those people involved in agriculture as well. I'll give you an example where biometrics and big data are quite critical and it's the area of genomics, the study of DNA and performance of a system at the genomic level.
Agriculture is a leader in taking up genomic technologies and applying them to plant and crop improvement, but that process generates enormous amounts of data. Biometric experts are in great demand across the health and other sectors that are absorbing genomic capacity. Agriculture is one of the leaders there, but it's not always the first sector that's thought of when you think of an advanced degree in bioengineering or in biometrics.