Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to all the witnesses for your testimony. This is very enlightening and very helpful, so I hope I have time to talk to everybody.
Ms. Ward from the National Farmers Union, we're talking here about easing the climate crisis by lowering the input uses and emissions, and how we can make that go a long way to boosting farm income because we know about the low margins. Farmers have that potential to remain productive and profitable at the same time even while they are reducing the use of purchased inputs.
However, as we have discussed today we know they can't do it alone. As the government, we need to partner and support and, in your words, incentivize farmers.
That's why I'm proud of one of the reasons our budget is allocating $10 million to help transition to clean energy from diesel farm fuel equipment, what we're talking about today, and that plan also mentioned to return $100 million in funds directly to the farmers through carbon pricing.
The partnership is so the farmers don't have to face that transition to lower emissions alone, and you mentioned that. I do appreciate reading your report “Tackling the Farm Crisis and the Climate Crisis” because one of the recommendations you had on the recommended policies was data collection. I wonder if you can help us, because you referred to on-farm energy use data being scarce or missing and more measurements of GHGs being needed to calibrate and verify the modelling.
To conduct these ongoing farm energy and emissions audits, what kinds of solutions would you suggest we can use so that we can take that data and move forward and work together?