Agriculture committee  On the roofs I think I would agree with. Over the fields, you're losing agricultural output, so you would want to be careful with that. Again, say for Southbrook, it was a seven-year payback for the panels, but it was a four-month payback to not use energy. You can cut a ribbon around a solar panel, but you can't see not using energy, so it doesn't have the same cachet or whatever.

Agriculture committee  I would say Southbrook is at net metering. He is doing it for policy reasons. Before that, there was a lucrative thing that brought down the cost of the solar. It really doesn't depend on how you do it, but I would really love to see something.... What about a program where you put panels in South Sudan or Uganda?

Agriculture committee  We've averaged $230,000 per year of savings to the bottom line for 50 factories in a row. We do water; we do energy; we do toxics; we do whatever. Food is the most lucrative of anything because they have invested everything to get it right to that point. If it falls off the line five feet before the package, but you were able to keep it on the line, basically, boom.

Agriculture committee  That's correct, yes. It's kind of shocking. Let's say we did a lobster factory in Nova Scotia. We just sat our people at the end of the line. Kody, you're going to do the claws and Tim will do tails. We just sat there and took out the meat that was left. It was over $300,000 per year of lobster.

Agriculture committee  First of all, throw out waste diversion percentage, because waste diversion looks worse when you save food. At Campbell Soup, we avoided 1,000 tonnes a year of food waste. Their waste diversion number went down because they used to be diverting it, but it's still better to have it as food than as diverted waste.

Agriculture committee  That's correct. Yes, I would say a co-funded program, say like the one that's on the table for us right now. We would have gone into 150 facilities starting next month, but our application was just declined. We would have started next month, going to 150 factories and helping them reduce food waste.

Agriculture committee  Yes. We're working with one in Guelph right now, called Our Food Future, I think. Basically we're working with half a dozen small manufacturers in that town, like a dairy, a brewery, a canning plant and a cidery. The circular economy means, instead of just making stuff and having it end up in landfill later on, it forms a circle, but most people don't think about the size of that circle.

Agriculture committee  Yes. There's a whole ecosystem of that right now. It's a whole ecosystem of how we can take organic waste and manage it. What we're advocating is how we can take organic waste and prevent it. That's the missing thing from most programs right now. It's where all the social value is, and economic and environmental value.

Agriculture committee  That's correct. It actually avoids the problem in the first place. The food that goes to the landfill turns into methane, but the food doesn't have to go to the landfill in the first place. It should be eaten as food. If you eat that food, you get back everything invested in the supply chain up to that point—the grocery store, the distribution, the manufacturer and the agricultural step.

Agriculture committee  That's correct. We also do toxic use reduction. They all intertwine. If you reduce the toxic, you need less ventilation, so you need less energy. They're all together. We don't try to pry them apart. We assess them all together. It's the most efficient way to go about it. There are no programs that are designed around that.

Agriculture committee  Sure. Thank you. We just actually responded to a challenge from this committee. They put it out to get 24 things. Unfortunately, we got a letter on Tuesday, saying that we weren't selected amongst the 25, so I'll take a really good look at those criteria to see what we're going to do.

Agriculture committee  Yes. You have one on the table right now. If you invested $2 million, you would help 150 food and beverage manufacturers across Canada save enough for two meals for every homeless person in Canada for 20 years, avoid 49,000 tonnes of embedded carbon per year and save $17 million dollars for those producers.

Agriculture committee  Yes, it works from.... We're doing some right now in a circular food economy demonstration project where there might be half a dozen employees, right up to Campbell's or Molson or Labatt, with thousands of employees. It's the same thing. The percentage is the same but the magnitude is different.

Agriculture committee  On the least expensive opportunity assessments, yes, basically you want to look for the value and not the cost of the audit. In the cheapest audit you cannot find new opportunities. You can only recommend what you've always recommended before. You can't measure anything. You actually want to buy that value, because that gives you the right answer later on.

Agriculture committee  We submitted an application under the Agriculture and Agri-Food program, the food waste reduction challenge, which included the Holland Marsh Growers' Association, where we've done a bunch of work in the past. We've previously worked with the Ontario Tender Fruit Growers and others.