Canadian agriculture, compared to its competitors, is a relatively low user of irrigation. We have a lot of untapped potential for sustainable irrigation on Canadian farms. The Government of Saskatchewan is picking up something that was started 60 years ago to build out greater irrigation infrastructure. The Canada Infrastructure Bank is a backer of that, so there is potential. It's a good example of finding the balance between conserving the resource that we have and leveraging it for irrigation, and I think we can do both in Canada.
R and D is really important. We have bred and developed more resilient crop varieties that are able to withstand droughts in ways they couldn't 20 or 25 years ago. That's a really good example of an R and D measure. Resilience in productivity is not necessarily directly related to water, but it is really critical to responding to this changing dynamic of water and climate change.
We need to do more. We need to invest more. We need to recognize that our models and our knowledge around how water is changing are also changing, and we're not doing enough. We called for a mission-driven research call.
One of the challenges we often get in agriculture is that rather than investing more and investing incrementally, we just keep adding research priorities to the existing budgetary envelope, and so rather than just adding water to the list, we think we need to actually invest more and dedicate and target that additional investment in water as a priority.