Agriculture committee  Absolutely, but some producers are getting tired of putting a lot of money into producing a product that the coyotes are feasting on. So we have to do both.

Agriculture committee  I want to make sure I understood the question properly.

Agriculture committee  There are input costs impacting producers' abilities to expand. There are rising costs of feed and fertilizer, and growing their own grains is becoming expensive. There are definitely costs associated with that. But when we look to expand a flock, investments need to be made in

Agriculture committee  They haven't brought that up specifically, to be honest. They need more tools in their tool boxes. I suspect that in some provinces guns are tools they already have. The issue is that we need some real knowledge around which predators to target. Going after any coyote is not th

Agriculture committee  There are 11,032, to be precise.

Agriculture committee  Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, and Saskatchewan are our biggest lamb-producing provinces, in that order. But Ontario and Quebec sort of vie for first and second, depending on what Stats Canada has to say. The average flock size is 99 head, and that's growing. So we're almost into tri

Agriculture committee  There is a flip side to that too. Some of the older producers are having a hard time with succession planning because farming isn't sexy. You're not making a lot of money at it. Sheep farming is very sexy.

Agriculture committee  I would love to comment. It's something that is often brought to our attention. The truth of the matter is, as we increase our breeding flocks, they're going to have market animals as well. Not as many ram lambs are sold as breeding stock as ewe lambs, and ram lambs, wethers, ten

Agriculture committee  Yes, that would be wonderful.

Agriculture committee  Because scrapie is classified as a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, so it's under the same umbrella as BSE. When the border closed to BSE, it closed to all ruminants.

Agriculture committee  I'll deal with what the industry is doing right now to increase expansion. I have to commend the government, actually, because it's been quite supportive in the past couple of years in helping us unroll programs for producers. So we've been able to develop tools producers can u

Agriculture committee  Right. If I were a drug company, I might be a little bit tentative about trying to test a product in such a small market. That's part of the reason why we're looking to have information and scientific knowledge come from other countries.

Agriculture committee  Currently we supply 41% of our demand, so 59% is being imported, from New Zealand, Australia, and then “other”. As I said earlier, New Zealand's and Australia's flocks are constricting, so the supply will start constricting. If we look at who might be knocking on the door to supp

Agriculture committee  There is huge potential for our sector to expand.

Agriculture committee  We can export feeder lambs and lambs direct to slaughter, but with the Canadian dollar being what it is, we're importing more product than exporting right now. Prior to the border closing, we were exporting slaughter and feeder lambs at a very high rate, but in the last three yea