Finance committee  The federal government is spending more than 40% of their annual budget in agriculture on bailout programs. If we can invest in research to prevent that type of stuff, the savings would be astronomical.

Finance committee  Certainly. Maybe it's easiest to give you an example. In the bean breeding program we have at Lethbridge, there's investment from the private sector and from government. The private sector wanted to scale up the work going on there, but they could not hire technical staff to car

Finance committee  Actually, I'll maybe pass that over to Richard. He's a little more versed in some of that.

Finance committee  Mr. Chairperson, honourable members, and guests, my name is Sheri Strydhorst. I have a PhD in production research. My husband and I farm in northwestern Alberta, and I'm the executive director with the Alberta Pulse Growers Commission. With me today, and sharing my time, is Rich

Finance committee  Annually right now I believe it is $280 million today, what is being spent, so a 10% increase....

Finance committee  How would we use...?

Finance committee  I guess we would measure it in terms of doing life cycle analyses to measure what are the improvements in water use and what are the reductions in soil losses and so forth, so it's measuring the sustainable metrics that these new technologies implement.

Finance committee  I don't know if we're necessarily looking for subsidizing these products in particular, but I think we need to brand them environmentally so the consumer is aware, and maybe that would increase demand and create a market pull in that respect. Looking at carbon footprinting of the

Finance committee  Pulses are very cost-competitive. They're not an expensive protein source. I think it's more that we need more things for the consumer to realize that, branding them as that environmentally friendly type of food product.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  Offsets have been looked at and doing some life cycle analysis to quantify exactly what kinds of benefits we are contributing. One of the struggles we're facing, though, is the issue of early adopters, so producers who have been farming and growing these pulse crops for the last

Finance committee  To add to that, there was the national farm stewardship program that was essentially achieving the same results, but funds in that program did run out in August 2008. This is seen as another way to implement a similar type of approach where there is more producer buy-in to it by

Finance committee  Mr. Chairperson, honourable members, and guests, my name is Sheri Strydhorst and I have a farm in northwest Alberta. I'm the executive director of the Alberta Pulse Growers Commission. With me today is Tom Jackson, a farmer who is an adviser to the Alberta Pulse Growers, from eas

Finance committee  It is a very different issue. That's a technology that our farmers definitely do not want. There's just something unnatural about that.

Finance committee  Right. But we need to create a policy environment where companies do want to invest in legitimate research that is going to help farmers. For example, if there's a fusarium disease on wheat, the private sector has resources to build that into our varieties, but there's no return