Thank you for welcoming me to this committee. When I got the first phone call, it was to appear virtually, so here I am today. I'm not prepared in the way that George Gilvesy from the greenhouse committee is, but here in agriculture in Prince Edward Island, I've been involved in the potato industry for my entire life.
Some of the changes from climate change are coming so fast, so offensively and in so many different ways, with pests attacking our crops and weather conditions like warmer falls and tropical storms bringing heavy amounts of rain.
Our crop insurance programs need to be updated so that we can use the technology that we have today. The labour force isn't available to walk the fields and monitor how much we leave. The reason we leave some of these spots in the field is that the crops will not store in storage. We have to opt them out, but unless the measurement is over two acres, those things are a bit harder for us to monitor.
The technology today for drones to measure the fields is available. This tool would work better in precision farming in documenting our inputs, and now we can do this electronically with the GPS on our tractors, but now this technology is overloading the cell towers, so the communication can't go from the tractor to the cell tower to the satellite, and therefore the machines sit in the field. As we have more people with cellphones, all of this technology is almost inadequate and makes it so it is not dependable.
It sounds like I'm giving you a list of things that are wrong and complaining about our industry, but my purpose here today is to help you be aware of how we need to make this technology dependable.
I guess I'll leave it at that. Thank you.