Thank you so much, Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Lewis, for your words, and thank you, Ms. Stafford, for appearing on behalf of the Cowichan Green Community. I know your organization quite well. I really want to thank you for illustrating what a region like Cowichan is going through and some of the challenges, and also Vancouver Island more generally, because being an island, we do have those issues with transportation and so on.
One of the big themes we've seen run through this committee in our hearings over the summer and continuing until the present day has been the theme of resiliency and how we build resiliency in our local food systems. I really thank you for mentioning that. It is a really important term. COVID-19 has put a big shock into our system, and we have to learn the lessons from this time to build for the future.
I want to go into some of the specifics that you outlined from your presentation. When you are speaking to farmers in the region and up and down Vancouver Island, can you talk a little bit about some of the specific things they really need? You're saying that you've seen an explosion of farm gates and so on, but what are we missing specifically in terms of processing capacity here on the island that may allow a small operation to really realize its full potential?