Agriculture committee  It's a tough problem.

Agriculture committee  In my case, since the Wheat Board was killed—

Agriculture committee  —and the assets were confiscated without compensation, one of the first things the Wheat Board did was to end its organic marketing program, so I've been forced to try to market through a system of independent brokers.

Agriculture committee  You're correct in that there are all sorts of other problems. There are low-level contaminants from pesticides, for instance, that turn up from time to time in organic production, and the organic farmers and the organic consumers have to work their way through that and try to pinpoint the source of that contamination.

Agriculture committee  Yes, I agree it's a very significant problem, and not one that's easy to deal with. You can imagine, bringing it right back to the farm level, how surprised I was to find out 15 years ago, when the first semi trailer came onto our farm to pick up organic production, that the semi trailer had cleaned itself out by leaving the slide gates open at the bottom of the trailers, driving to my farm and hoping that any seeds in that trailer would drop out onto the road before they got to my farm.

Agriculture committee  Thanks for the question. It's a very difficult topic area. I personally believe there should be zero tolerance. But in practical terms, the promoters of genetically modified technology tried to insist at the outset that it wouldn't happen, that there just wouldn't be contamination, that there wouldn't be gene flow, and that there wouldn't be pollen flow.

Agriculture committee  No, I still wouldn't, because first and foremost, we have to put the consumers at the top. The consumers are telling us, in terms of genetic modification, that either they have a zero-tolerance policy or they want mandatory labelling. We have to put the consumers first or none of us will be in business.

Agriculture committee  It's something that should be discussed internally. It's a domestic discussion for the people of Canada. In that sense, it's very relevant in terms of the domestic discussion about trade agreements. If I could, I would just take a second to go back to your previous question about grain pricing.

Agriculture committee  I think I started to address that in my opening remarks, but really what we're seeing right now in the grains industry is a move away from Canada as being a high-quality, reliable supporter of grains, especially wheat, to a low-cost production model. That low-cost production model has not served other Canadian farmers, like hog farmers, well.

Agriculture committee  Non-organic would be several thousand.

Agriculture committee  The only number I would have at hand...and not all of these farmers were in my Wheat Board district, but in my particular chapter of my certifying agency, there were about 100 to 125. I don't know how many organic farmers there are in southern Alberta. A rough guess would be a couple of hundred.

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Allen. I share the disappointment that Mr. Richards has used important committee time, in my view, to try to smear witnesses. I have had in the intervening couple of minutes the opportunity to think about my outgoing speech at the NFU convention. In fact, that quote Mr.

Agriculture committee  Thanks. The latest statistics that I have are from about a week ago. The use of producer cars is down by 20% to 25% so far. Whether it will continue to drop or whether it will pick up is hard to tell. I've also heard that, at least in some localities, the price of the farmers' grain loaded into these producer cars is actually less than what's being offered at the local elevators, which would mean that between the railways and the system and marketing in general, the value of producer cars may already be being extracted out of farmers' pockets and allocated somewhere else.

Agriculture committee  Yes, that's correct.

Agriculture committee  We have launched previous court actions against the government, starting in 2007—