That's a complex question. I think I alluded earlier in my presentation to the challenges of diversity. From the perspective of our international trade obligations, our programs that deliver in-support funding—what we call business risk management programs—have to be designed to be whole-farm. In other words, they can't be directed at, say, the horticulture farm or the cow-calf farm. They have to be whole-farm. They have to be regionally available. You can't have one regional area having access to a program that another doesn't.
That sometimes makes it challenging for small farms to access those programs. We're looking at how those business risk management programs are working right now, for two reasons. One is that federal, provincial, and territorial ministers tasked officials to do that back when they established Growing Forward 2, but on top of that, the current government has directed my minister to look specifically at business risk management programs to determine if they're working for all farms.
That's one area. The other area is the issue of certification.
I won't impose on Paul as I did before, chicken heart that I was. [Technical difficulty] ...recognized, with the backing of CFIA, even though it's voluntary. I think that's very important for small niche farms.
We also have a program called the Canadian Agricultural Loans Act program, or CALA. I'm a bureaucrat, so I remember acronyms. The point of the program is to make funding accessible to young farmers who are purchasing assets such as on-farm capital assets. CALA is designed to facilitate the entry of young farmers, regardless of scale. It's scale independent.
I think the other source of support is in the cost-shared programming, to which we contribute 60 cents on every dollar for each province. We have agreed with provinces that we've established a series of policy outcomes that we all adhere to, but we've given provinces flexibility in how they reach those outcomes.
I would guess that most provinces have programming that is designed to help small farms stay productive. You're quite right that a family running a small farm may not be able to live exclusively off that farm, but generally speaking they can have a profitable farm, and that's supplemented by off-farm income.