Thank you, and thank you to the committee for having us here today.
Excuse me if I get a little impassioned with the answer. I grew up on a potato farm in P.E.I. and studied plant breeding at the University of Guelph, so new plant varieties are probably more exciting to me than many.
There are a lot of examples of where new varieties could have come to market in Canada and then didn't. Linking back to what Dennis said in his opening statement and how this relates to processing capacity, I'm sure you've heard from many folks about what it takes to get a processing plant built and how you create an environment that is ripe for investment in this space, but part of that is that you have the product to process in your country that is desired by the person investing in the plant.
I can give you a couple of examples of where opportunities have passed us by.
Recently, a company working out of Saskatchewan, Yield10, developed four canola varieties with a higher oil content. This is a great processing opportunity and it has benefits for more than just the processor. The farmers are getting more oil per acre, so their greenhouse and carbon footprint is going down. Their farm gate values are going up, and also, then, a processor is able to produce canola oil more efficiently because they're crushing less canola per minute to get the same amount of oil. What that comes back to is that it helps the processor decide that Canada is where they're going to put their capital investment.
Unfortunately, they've taken those varieties to the United States first. Those are new canola varieties developed in Canada and commercialized in the U.S. first. As that gets to critical mass acreage and you're a processing company trying to decide where you're going to build that plant, things are leaning in the direction of the other jurisdiction. We have other examples that follow along.
Coming to future examples, the protein industry supercluster has invested $30 million in some high-protein varieties that are really exciting and have a lot of opportunity for Canada, but if we don't have a clear pathway to commercialization in Canada, you could also see those be commercialized elsewhere. There's a high-oil soybean in the United States developed by Calyxt, and we still don't have approvals for that in Canada.
More so than just getting the approvals, it's the idea that they're needed at all for certain products in Canada. In many countries, the standard food safety requirements are all that is needed and no special reviews of these new products. While at times we talk about gene editing, which is the interesting and exciting new kid on the block for technology, this is really about plant breeding at large, and the plant breeding industry in Canada has seen the impact of our regulatory system over the years. We're falling behind the rest of the world.
If we can catch up, if we can make Canada competitive for new varieties that are either specialty for processing or provide the farmer the ability to produce that variety more efficiently per acre, more sustainably per acre and with higher value per acre, it just continues to create the environment where building processing capacity continues to make more and more sense.
I hope that responds to your question.