Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thanks to both witnesses for their excellent testimony this morning.
I'd like to begin with Dr. Bedard-Haughn.
I will be lobbying my committee members to ensure that all three of your recommendations and points end up in the final report. I really do feel that they are very timely and accurate.
Being a farm boy from southern Ontario, from vegetable producers, I also appreciate the dirt-under-the-nails perspective that we bring to the settings that we find ourselves in. I'd like to begin by talking about Canada's participation in a lot of international discussions around some of the climate challenges and some of the soil challenges that we're facing.
Can you provide your assessment of some benchmarking as to where Canada is, relative to the other breadbaskets? Obviously, Ukraine is much in the news now but there are also the U.S.; Australia, which we've talked about a bit, and Brazil as other major food- producing areas.
Where are we at in our soil preservation, and in our storing our carbon and our gas emissions from agriculture? Can you provide us with a rough benchmark?