I'll touch on your first question briefly in terms of the impact of gas and diesel usage on our farms and ranches. It's our primary usage for our equipment, for our combines, our tractors and a lot of the other equipment that we use on our farms and our farm trucks, but there are interesting alternatives coming out. We have been holding an NFUniversity webinar series over the course of this winter and our most recent webinar was on electrification of farm equipment. There are some really interesting possibilities coming up, even aftermarket upgrades you can do to your diesel equipment that are going to allow you to use biodiesel without a whole bunch of the knock-on problems and challenges that come with it.
I think the real thing that we need to address...because innovation is going to catch up with us. Farmers are early adopters and we just need the incentives to jump on board with that. The EU is outspending us in terms of agri-environmental payments to farmers by multiple factors of 10, which really does disadvantage our Canadian farms.
The cost if we don't address the climate crisis is kind of incalculable. If you talk to crop scientists it's not just extra carbon and our longer growing seasons are going to mean we can grow more food. It's going to mean heat waves that are going to impinge on the growth capacity of our plants, droughts that are going to severely impact the rate of gain of our animals out on pasture, let alone the hail and windstorms, the tornados and all the other extreme weather.
I talk to young farmers who are just getting into farming right now and they've never known a simple, calm growing season. I'm one of the last.