Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to the committee today. This is also my first opportunity.
This is my colleague, Abimbola Abiola, from Olds College, in Alberta. We're representing four nodes of activity with agricultural campuses across Canada, looking at renewable energy and sustainability as they relate to linking agriculture and rural communities. Each of those campuses is indeed in a rural community.
From my own experience, I moved to Ridgetown, Ontario, 20 years ago, and our population has declined by around 3% to 5% annually. Most of our smart people—except me—moved away and have taken jobs elsewhere. This is something that's near and dear to my heart, in that we need to look at turning around that tide of declining rural economies and taking advantage of the opportunities that we see in the bioeconomy and also in the areas of renewable energy.
When you look at this type of endeavour, it has to do with many different facets, many different areas of emphasis and so on. It's not just agriculture. It's not just rural economies. It's not environment alone. It's not energy alone. It cuts across all of those sectors.
What many folks have noticed is that there is no single body or unit that brings those pieces together at the grassroots so that we can enjoy and put together all the benefits. That's what CARES came about as trying to be. It's about being applied, it's about being grassroots, it's about rolling out technologies and integrating them so that we can maximize our benefits to improve the rural economy.
With my partner here, Dr. Abimbola Abiola, we're trying to spearhead this across Canada. We have been working with Alma College, or Collège d'Alma, in Quebec, and also with the Nova Scotia Agricultural College. We hope to emerge, with the leadership of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, as a lead organization to bring these various institutions together so that we can engage our youth, our agricultural communities, our rural communities, in trying to stimulate the best advantage of all of these important areas of environment: nutrient cycling, water cycling, and the creation of energy and utilization of energy.
Again, we are focused on the community aspect and the farm and rural areas. We are here to try to alleviate the risk that these agricultural producers take when they adopt these technologies: try it first, and then try to look at ways to integrate these technologies, and then allow them to take it over. It's about scale. It's about looking at the footprint. It's about how to integrate all of these things together.
So this community of enterprises, which will be something that we have across Canada, is about technology assessment, it's about commercialization. We also have the opportunity, then, to build education programs: to train our youth to learn how to manage and operate these technologies and support them. It's about looking at opportunities for applied research and consulting with the various clients we have.
We have the vision and goals to be the conduit for these types of technologies for the rural community and to try to accelerate access to these technologies and increase their adoption. We want to promote innovative and interdisciplinary research on renewable energy issues relevant to the agricultural community. Our goal is also to serve agriculture, primarily through the primary producers, through the application of research results, consultation, and the introduction of new program initiatives. We seek to be a leader in curriculum development in the area of renewable energy at the technical, undergraduate, and graduate levels and in a range of professional and continuing education initiatives. We also seek to be a source of current, comprehensive information on renewable energy for a range of audiences through publications, newsletters, visiting scholars, demonstrations, conferences, and workshops, as well as electronic media.
So what are some of the direct spinoff benefits of what we hope to do?
We hope to stimulate the rural economy, as new technologies will need to be built and serviced. We hope to increase the profitability of farms, making the industry more attractive for young farmers. We hope to provide high-skilled employment for youth in the rural regions. We also hope to provide a green bridge between agriculture and rural communities--closing that loop. We seek to launch a paradigm shift from highly centralized, fossil-fuel-dependent agriculture to closed-loop agriculture with reduced environment and energy impact.
We've sought to establish this centre. It had its first meeting with a national board of directors in January. We're meeting quarterly, as a board of directors, to get this particular organization off the ground. Our next meeting is in April, at the end of this month.
Again, our partners are Olds College, in the west; and we have the Great Lakes region, represented by the University of Guelph at the Ridgetown campus; Quebec, being represented by Collège d'Alma; and the maritime region being represented by the Nova Scotia Agricultural College.
I'd like to give my colleague, Dr. Abiola, a chance to explain how Olds is working on this as well.