Agriculture committee  Exactly, and that's why I'm putting it out there. It's sad when you go to YouTube and see our video and the next thing is some Tyson farms exposé. Well, just because they think that's what's happening.... I mean, there's literally a video camera and a guy outside a silver barn, not knowing what's inside there.

Agriculture committee  —and even with the fact that we would tell them it has been illegal in Canada since 1963, they still didn't believe us. We showed them the legislation. They still didn't believe us. We thought this was so outlandish that we said we would make something outlandish, too, and that would get their attention.

Agriculture committee  It's literally the Chicken Squad. They have flak jackets. I play the evil guy who pretends to inject steroids and hormones into chickens, and I have to run away from the squad. You can check it out on the Web. It's amazing. It has almost 750,000 views on YouTube right now, so we're getting that message out there about Canadian chicken and how it's a good, clean, healthy food source for Canadians.

Agriculture committee  I did, but as an order of respect, I did shut my cellphone off.

Agriculture committee  You mentioned that the chickens are big because of good genetics and good clean protein in their feed, right? In British Columbia, actually, we have what's called the Chicken Squad. It's a marketing program that we started in British Columbia. Because of our Poultry in Motion educational trailer, we found that the number one message we were telling people and that they did not believe was that there are no steroids or hormones in Canadian chicken—

Agriculture committee  Personally as a poultry producer, I think that every country has its own protectionist way of protecting its borders. If it's not through tariffs, it could be through insisting that meat from a country be cooked to 500° before it comes in. That's an exaggeration, but I know there are things like that out there.

Agriculture committee  On your first question about how we deal with things from the different commodities and how to gain that trust, I think just coming to our conference and networking with each other and learning that we all have this strong passion for agriculture, that's where we gain the trust to share that information with each other.

Agriculture committee  There's something we're doing as individual farmers. Mr. Shipley mentioned Andrew Campbell, who started the hashtag #farm365 for Twitter, which has just taken off. He's sharing a picture of his farm every day of the year so he can get the message out to people about what he does on his farm, uncovering what's behind the farm door.

Agriculture committee  I love technology, because I can do so much more with less. I am a broiler chicken producer. I can go to my cellphone right now and know by the second how heavy my birds are, how much they're eating, and how much they're drinking. I can adjust my fans and the lights. Anything I can do when I'm there, I can do from here.

Agriculture committee  Right now.

Agriculture committee  Yes, I do.

Agriculture committee  As you know, land prices in British Columbia are very high. When I come to these conferences and I tell other people that I pay $80,000 to $100,000 an acre for my land, some of them literally say, “Why are you still farming?” Through our program, we have high-value, intensive agriculture in Abbotsford just so we can maintain our costs of production and actually farm in that area.

Agriculture committee  Those are our provincial organizations. B.C. actually didn't have one. I came to the Canadian Young Farmers' in 2007, and I found out that there were younger farmer groups but B.C. didn't have one. In 2008, I went back to British Columbia and started the BC Young Farmers as a committee of the British Columbia Agriculture Council.

Agriculture committee  The other benefit of having that training in schools is that even if they don't grow up to become farmers, they learn where their food comes from, and we won't have the disconnect like we see right now in Canada—it is so global—where people don't know where their food comes from.

Agriculture committee  One huge benefit they have down in the States, too, is the Future Farmers of America, or the FFA, which is built into their high school system. It helps teach agriculture in their system. We also had the opportunity to go down to their national event in Kentucky for the Future Farmers of America, where there were over 60,000 participants.