Agriculture committee  Yes.

Agriculture committee  Thank you to the committee for letting me make a few remarks today. I'm very happy to accept the invitation to present to you today. I have an important message from Grain Farmers of Ontario and the farmer members we represent. My name is Markus Haerle. I am the chair of Grain

Agriculture committee  Great.

Agriculture committee  There have been quite a few acres being shifted away from corn this spring, especially in southern Ontario and eastern Ontario, where we're close to ethanol plants. Those are our main avenues of getting the crop to market. What that's actually doing is there's going to be a rec

Agriculture committee  Okay, sounds good. The corn imports are actually going to be a real problem for us because, first of all, every acre of corn that the farmer was anticipating to plant and has planted is at the moment going to be losing money. That's why we sent you that backgrounder that's show

Agriculture committee  Yes.

Agriculture committee  Indirectly, yes it does because it is a cost that's being downloaded to us as farmers. There's no way we can offset that in any way into the marketplace. That $170 loss is because, first of all, the markets are not there that are going to pay us for the cost of producing it. Als

Agriculture committee  Yes, AgriInvest is a program that works, but it is underfunded. If that program were increased, because it creates liquidity for a business right away, it's yearly and it's there for farmers to use.... Other than that, there's also the crop insurance program, which works signif

Agriculture committee  You can usually flip that number right around, instead of a negative, you can turn it into positive. That's basically what it is.

Agriculture committee  It's been fairly steady. I'd say a good mark...if you can get that from the marketplace. That's why I'm saying that the crop insurance program is based on those figures as well. It is actually quite reliable that we can bank on those numbers.

Agriculture committee  They're diversified into other commodities, often enough. When we did our survey of our farmer members, we surveyed them not just on the grains and oilseeds, but on the whole farm structure. Depending on the split of what they produce on their farm, that will determine what the i

Agriculture committee  By our outreach to farmer members, we can figure roughly about 50% have qualified for the program. In the early stage of the program, it was far less, because there was a lot of confusion, some hesitation and I think some parameters didn't quite fit the farms' structure. Even tod

Agriculture committee  Would that question be for me?

Agriculture committee  Yes, that is actually since the pandemic. That was just a week or two after the pandemic hit and restrictions were put in place. We felt the impact on that reduction right off the bat, so it—

Agriculture committee  The direct impact to a farmer in Canada is basically that we have to compete now against grain that is subsidized. Like I said to the committee just before, the problem is going to be that we are going into the world markets, so subsidized grain that's going onto the world market