Agriculture committee  I can give you one cereal grain example that is actually happening in Australia. It's an example in which they have drought-tolerant wheat coming. It's using biotechnology—not necessarily GM, but it's biotech wheat. They're looking at 20% yield increases in the dry years using th

Agriculture committee  The other legislation that is before the House is Bill C-27, to clean up the voters list and to remove banks and financial institutions and other people who just have an interest but don't actually farm. Whether it's a minimum amount of tonnage, we'd be interested in finding some

Agriculture committee  If I were to gaze 20 years into the future, the crops themselves may be the same, but as Stephen is getting at, there will be a lot of different traits within those crops. I think we'll see nitrogen fixation. As we have seen with pulse crops and legumes, where they put nitrogen b

Agriculture committee  Yes. They'll either put nitrogen in or require far less nitrogen. They'll make better use of the nutrients in the soil than today. Even today, a lot of the fertilizer is washed away. A lot of it is not used by the plants, because we have to over-fertilize to make sure enough gets

Agriculture committee  I'm always reminded of a line in the movie, Field of Dreams: “Build it and they will come.” One of the challenges we have is that there is a lot of slippage, especially for the cereal grains in western Canada. Only a small percentage of the farmers in barley, for example, are a

Agriculture committee  Yes, just very briefly. One area where we've had some concern in the cereal grain side is that we've had some new barleys come along. Low-phytate barley is an example. It gets designated as a plant with a novel trait and has to go through extra processes for approval. We're the

Agriculture committee  As part of the grains innovation round table, which was started several years ago, we actually had a group working on low-level presence. We hired a consultant who went through all of the federal acts and regulations to determine how many acts in Parliament would actually touch s

Agriculture committee  I know that's the first time, but....

Agriculture committee  Public research is really key. There's just stuff that they put their teeth into where there's no.... I know the minister, through the cluster, has been trying to get research more focused into the exact needs, but you do need a little bit of that “pie in the sky” research, the “

Agriculture committee  Let me just go back a little bit in time to when Monsanto was going to bring in its Roundup Ready wheat. The farm group I was with at the time told Monsanto that it was a really bad idea, that it would cause too much market disruption. As a result of a lot of concerns raised in t

Agriculture committee  I can't trace the actual dollars, Mr. Easter, but I would say that we were really upset when NSERC announced about two months ago that they were dropping agriculture as a priority. A lot of farm groups raised a lot of noise about that. I now see in The Western Producer of March

Agriculture committee  Yes. We did read your release, Mr. Easter. I went over it, and I sat down, and we went through it line by line as to what was cut. Some programs were being phased out, but there were some actual real dollars cut there. One was the agri-opportunities program, where you'd bring in

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Stephen. I have three quick points to raise. The first is a misconception about corporate concentration in the seed business and farmers being forced to buy seed from one or two companies. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have here a couple of documents that

Agriculture committee  We're going to share our time, Mr. Chair. Thank you for inviting us to discuss the need for biotechnology research in Canada. My name is Richard Phillips and I am with the Grain Growers of Canada. My wife and I have a farm in Saskatchewan, where we grow wheat, oats, barley, pe

International Trade committee  I can't think of the exact name of the program, but there is a federal program--in fact it was available under the Liberal government, as well--where the industry, not just one company, can get together. They put together a marketing plan, for example, how can we expand canola