Agriculture committee  I think the impact of something like no-till farming has been huge. Certainly it has been down in the States, where around 18 million acres are now grown by no-till farming. People don't realize just how much carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere by farming in this count

Agriculture committee  Yes. Our drought technology came out of the University of Toronto. We've established a chair of plant biotechnology there. We have a very close link between our research laboratory in Kingston and the University of Toronto. We're also establishing a very close link with Queen's

Agriculture committee  I think that's right. Some of the most intelligent people I've ever met are farmers. If they're not very intelligent and don't have good business savvy, then they don't stay in business. You're absolutely correct. The question is this. The growing of food crops is probably alway

Agriculture committee  One of the things that is really important to a company like ours is that we're commercially viable, so we look at the commercial viability of any product. The only government support we've received is the R and D tax credit. This is incredibly important, and I hope people conti

Agriculture committee  We are dealing with climate change. There are going to be changes in heat and drought that we're going to have to face, and it's going to be major. Going from 1960 to around this time now, from corn, we went from 30 bushels per acre to 160, 170 bushels per acre, so it's a huge in

Agriculture committee  I don't know where the concept of three months is coming from, to be very truthful with you. It usually costs somewhere between $10 million and $20 million at least, per variety, to register a transgenic crop, so it's a huge number of studies. Transgenic crops are the most studie

Agriculture committee  Yes. I think if we're going to use plants for making biofuels, they're going to have to be grown on marginal lands. You can't put them on first-grade land because that will have to be used for food crops. We have to be aware there are 842 million people in the world who are basic

Agriculture committee  Just a brief comment on SemBioSys. It's a very clever technology. One of the advantages of using a plant over using animal sources for some of these drugs is that plant viruses and diseases are totally different from animal viruses and diseases, so you can very likely produce saf

Agriculture committee  There is a real problem of risk in what we do. A major problem we have in Canada is taking really great research from the universities and government labs and actually commercializing it. The amount of funding available for that in terms of investment funding is very limited in C

Agriculture committee  Thank you very much for letting me make this presentation to you today. My own background is that I was a professor at Queen's University for 28 years before we founded a company in 1996. Just about two weeks ago, Sir David King, the chief science advisor to the U.K., said tha