I'm going to pick on a corn plant and take you through the harvest of a corn plant. We have been harvesting corn for many years now. In 1975, if I had gone into a restaurant—I would have been in grade 9—and told someone I had 100-bushels-to-the-acre corn, I would have been told I was a liar and a snot-nosed brat and to get out. The reality is that here we are, heading rapidly towards 2025, and in Ontario I believe the average yield of corn this year will be very close to 180 bushels to the acre.
The significance of this is that we are generally harvesting only the corn kernels. That means there's the corncob, cornstalk, corn leaves and all the rest of that kind of stuff. We harvest those corn kernels and we send them off to be livestock feed or to be sugars used for humans in the production of a plethora of products. The reality is that all that other stuff remains. The problem with that stuff that remains now is that it's in excess of what the soil needs for its continued existence. We have soils in Canada that desperately need LIDAR and a national application of that or to get the soil survey information done.
Let's go back to the residue for a minute. If all that residue is left there in the spring, I can't plant. So I'm now harvesting some of that residue, leaving most of it there, so that the residue can go to a plant and they can extract sugars out of that cellulosic material—not grain corn, but cellulosic material. That's why nothing about the language we're using here reflects reality, in some cases. I can't offer you second-generation ethanol, because I don't know what it is. I know that I grew corn to sell at the Chicago Board of Trade for a profit. I know that if your parents didn't have kids, you probably won't either. That means if I don't grow the corn to make a profit someplace, I'm not going to give you cornstalks.
Those cornstalks now are not waste. They are, again, another portion or another turn on that circular economy that can go to be sugars, chemicals, fuels or natural gas. We can move it down through the system. Sarnia, Ontario, is the starting point for that.