Thank you for that question.
It's great to have you here. You were really tough on me as a board member, so it's nice to have you out of my hair. We were in your riding yesterday. I wasn't, but my team was on the roof at R.A. Rose & Sons, installing an AgIntel antenna, and I was in town getting a haircut. We expect that will save them about $70 an acre this year, and the data will never leave their control.
That's really where this project started. Farmers are not willing to implement precision agriculture. It's so data-intensive that they won't implement it unless they know their data will be secure as an asset for the farm. That was an idea that emerged prior to artificial intelligence becoming such a concern or an opportunity. Now that it's taking place and people are asking ChatGPT or Claude what they should do and how they should do it, we can't lose the sovereignty and control over that data.
As the AI strategy starts to filter out and as you hear about the importance of health and health data, I would argue that agricultural data is equally important to the sovereignty of our economy and certainly of our food security. There's a path forward where we can deliver the value, the business risk management and the food security. It requires an investment in technology and in digital infrastructure, and it will ensure our national sovereignty, our food sovereignty, our national security and our food security.
Much the same as that we don't want to send Canadian chickpeas away and buy marked-up chickpea pasta, our data has to be value added at home. We have to process our data at home. It has to be an asset owned by the farmer. It can't be an asset owned by a large, multinational corporation and have the value add of that data be sold back to the farmer at a significant markup. We have to take a grassroots approach to this, and only then can we leverage these new-found technologies into increased food security.