I've talked about the number of programs. I wouldn't have time in a six-minute round of questions to list all of them. I'm happy to provide you with a list of all the partnering organizations, as well as the funding models and research projects that are going on there right now.
I will give you an example, Mr. Barlow: the check-off fees. Everybody at this committee ought to be aware that producers pay a check-off fee, and that money pays for various projects and programs in various commodity organizations. One of them is research.
If you're paying for wheat research in a black soil area like central Alberta, and the only black soil research centre in Canada is being closed down, as a wheat producer in that area, what confidence will you have that the money you're now contributing to research is going to be of any benefit when you have no trials to prove that any new varieties or any new commodities coming onto the market will be successful in the area of the country you're growing in?
For the edification of everybody here in the committee, land values in my constituency for agricultural land are north of $1.5 million per quarter section. It is some of the most highly valued and expensive land used in agriculture in Canada, because you can grow varieties and crops where you get yields in excess of 100 bushels per acre because that land is so valuable.
Furthermore, regarding shutting down Lacombe, if you're running trials as a researcher, you're running trials at a variety of different places because it's a redundancy. At any point in time you could get hail on your trials or you could have issues where you have a loss of these trials. If you're going to centralize everything and just do a handful of research facilities, if something does go wrong, you're going to lose entire years of research because you don't have redundancy.
I can't find anybody from any producer organization or anybody involved in agriculture at all who is praising this decision.