Agriculture committee  Certainly if you went to having it partially NISA-based, that would be bankable. One of the things that happened in the past was that the accounting services forced us to add the NISA accounts to our balance sheets, which was a good thing. I am always perplexed about why we see

Agriculture committee  Certainly within the community a large portion of the production is protected by contract and the contractual agreements between a producer and the processor to purchase the product. On the commodity input side, one of the risks that many agricultural producers take at this poi

Agriculture committee  Certainly for many parts of horticulture it would be a great advantage to look at that. One of the fears that you will find within Canada—and again, it's a divide between eastern and western Canada—is the fear that if we go to a total national program, it is going to be largely g

Agriculture committee  Certainly, within certain commodities such as horticulture, I think it probably makes sense to look at things nationally. One of the problems we have within the Canadian Horticultural Council is that crop insurance is not offered for all the crops. There's a huge variation in h

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Easter. I think one of the biggest benefits that we, as a Canadian industry, have is the effort we have put into a very close working relationship with our U.S. counterparts. We appreciate the efforts of the Canadian government in their government-to-government e

Agriculture committee  Our feeling is that if we wanted to look at something like minimum pricing internationally, we would probably also want to look at it interprovincially, so that we'd be re applying the same rules within the country as we're applying at our borders. I'm not convinced it would be t

Agriculture committee  Again, we're certainly very open to dialogue and to working together with the government to try to find the solutions. There are solutions under the Health of Animals Act for cases of BSE, avian flu, etc., that we can probably utilize and model against. But as an industry, the fi

Agriculture committee  No, and again, we just came out of our annual meeting. We had initial discussions with CFIA to indicate to them that we want to open the discussions on this. However, it seems we're constantly in the position of putting out fires. With the current round of testing we've just comp

Agriculture committee  Thank you for the question. It's very difficult to come up with a model without first of all sitting down together with government to dialogue. At this point, what our request has been is to initiate the dialogue between producers and government. Part of the problem, as you cer

Agriculture committee  Thank you for the invitation to speak to the committee today on business risk management. My name is Keith Kuhl, and I'm the president of the Southern Manitoba Potato Co. Ltd., a fourth-generation family farm based in Winkler, Manitoba. We specialize in the production of fresh-p