Agriculture committee  Yes, but I don't know if I can go into details on that. We run into a lot of restrictions because of partnership agreements, regulation issues, and the whole liability of training.

Agriculture committee  That question, I have to admit, is actually out of the scope of my expertise. Sorry.

Agriculture committee  That's what FarmLINK is doing.

Agriculture committee  It would hitch on to the back of a pickup. There are chicken abattoirs, and certainly slaughtering chickens is a problem in the area, more perhaps than slaughtering beef. There would be an inspected facility that is pulled behind—a big stainless steel apparatus.

Agriculture committee  The other option is mobile abattoirs. We would like to see some mobile abattoirs. There is less stress on the animals and it deals with the smaller producers that have....

Agriculture committee  From a personal standpoint, I can tell you that when I wanted to start farming, I approached every large bank and Farm Credit. They actually came to the farm and they almost laughed at the place. Four years later it sold for almost $100,000 more. We didn't come from farm backgrounds, but there was a salary there in support, and they were just not interested.

Agriculture committee  I'm not too sure what you refer to when you say insurance, but certainly FarmStart is looking at such programs as a dollar matching. Some new farmers think they should be able to buy a farm in their early twenties. We can't normally buy a home in our early twenties. But if they start putting a dollar aside and every dollar is matched, that's one example.

Agriculture committee  There are a few apprenticeship-type programs that exist. They're very small and scattered. One of them is called CRAFT, the Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training. It was originally out of the States, and there are now five regions in Ontario that are offering it. It's an interesting process, because of course when you have somebody new on the farm come, they smash into things, they break the tractor down, and so on.

Agriculture committee  We actually run an incubation farm in Brampton. There are twelve or so farmers on it now. But for an organization like ours, it's very hard, with just our few staff, to run farms across the province.

Agriculture committee  I'm not finding that its mainly Chinese. We seem to be getting a lot from Egypt and, as I said, from Dubai. I'm meeting someone from Dubai tomorrow. The stats now are that in Toronto, over 60% of the people there were not born in Canada. So it's my sense that these people are growing food for their communities within metro areas like Toronto.

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Larry, for allowing me to speak at the last minute. I want to speak because I have some good news, and I'd like to put maybe a last nice spin to this. I also have some answers to some of the questions raised in the first panel. Ten years ago, almost to this day, I became a new farmer in this area and farmed sheep for six years.