Agriculture committee  Thank you. My name is Mike Ammeter. I'm the chair of the Canadian Canola Growers Association. I farm at Sylvan Lake, Alberta, which is an hour and a half north of Calgary. I grow canola, pulses, wheat and barley on 1,400 acres. With me today is Dave Carey, CCGA's VP of governme

Agriculture committee  Thanks for the question. I think I mentioned that I'm from Alberta, and we have had a carbon tax. We had it for a few years, and then we didn't have a carbon tax. It's been a bit of back and forth. To nail down the actual cost, I did a little bit of digging into my own billing

Agriculture committee  I would have to say that I'm not aware of any. As I said in my testimony, I did an upgrade on my dryer a number of years ago, and as far as I know, I am as current, if you will, or as up-to-date as possible with the latest technology on my dryer for efficiency. There's just nothi

Agriculture committee  It does take time. All these things cost money, and if money were no object, I'm sure every farm in the Prairies that has a grain dryer would be up to the latest and greatest, but we have so many different demands on us: upgrading equipment here and there, new tractors, combines

Agriculture committee  Yes, that's completely fair to say. Our money comes from the crops we grow when we sell them. Having an extra cost is the Achilles heel, if you will, of the crop sector, of agriculture like that. I am a price-taker. I cannot add a surcharge if I sell a load of grain and I need a

Agriculture committee  Yes, that's far simpler.

Agriculture committee  Yes, actually it can be literally days or weeks. Probably our worst harvest in recent memory was in 2019. Some of you may have seen that it had the tag line or the name “harvest from hell”. We were just on a mad scramble. Typically you try to keep ahead of the harvesting combine

Agriculture committee  Yes. Maybe Dave would like to jump in. He can flesh that out a little bit more for you.

Agriculture committee  Yes, I don't think there's any question about that, if we can get some help. That's always the critical issue: How do I pay for these things? I want to do something different, I want to do something better, but there are only so many dollars to go around. Critical things like thi

Agriculture committee  Personally, I haven't. Maybe Dave can speak to that point.

Agriculture committee  The quick answer would be that I have to see what's available as an alternative. That is the challenge. If there is no alternative, an investment partnership or however you want to term it, it's a moot point. Like I said with my grain dryer, I've kind of reached peak efficiency f

Agriculture committee  It would certainly accelerate any transitions we have, but I'll go back to my previous point. I need to see something that will do the job for me. That's going to be the key—to find an alternative. If there is an alternative, the faster we go, the better off we will be. I hope I

Agriculture committee  To my understanding, I don't think so. I'm not aware of that. The dryer that I have was originally propane—and this is nothing against Mr. Kelly's product—but we have a pretty good natural gas distribution system, and I was able to tap into that. It's very close to our farm. It i

Agriculture committee  That's kind of tough. Arguably, if I were going to tell you, I'd try to give you a number for how many tonnes per acre. Quite frankly, I don't even know that. I couldn't tell you. Something I will go back to is your comment about drying with biomass. That would be true, because

Agriculture committee  Here's the challenge. For crop residue, if I were going to collect the residue off my crops—canola, wheat and barley—probably barley residue, barley straw, would be the superior one, I would think. I would need to have that collected the year prior and ready to use in my grain dr