Agriculture committee  Because of the relationships we're building through chickpeas, lentils, and other crops, we have opportunities at our doorstep to sell our cereal crops. It almost becomes an issue of our customers overseas thinking it must be a language barrier. They want to buy our durum, and we

Agriculture committee  Tax incentives are helpful. The capital gains exemptions are helpful. Really the role we see government being able to play is sending the message back to the general public, the urban people, Canadians, that agriculture is a huge contributor to the Canadian economy and to our G

Agriculture committee  We have heard often about the farmers in Europe being subsidized heavily. When we've travelled there to meet other producers to get a handle on what these subsidies are and how they are managing them, we realized that the actual farmer wasn't as subsidized as we originally though

Agriculture committee  Yes. I believe that part of the reason we don't have a lot of value-added processing on the Prairies is due to the monopoly. I also believe that the monopoly has played a prohibitive role in research for new varieties of wheat. It's the only commodity we grow that doesn't have a

Agriculture committee  There's just an image out there that producers go to their mailbox to get their pay cheque from the government, and it's really what we're trying to get away from. We want to be able to manage our business on our own and treat it like any other business. I think the reason there

Agriculture committee  I respectfully tend to disagree; we can't have the best of both worlds. I think we can have a system for those who want to use the Canadian Wheat Board. It won't be a system that includes a monopoly or a single desk. But there are a lot of cooperatives out there that are really g

Agriculture committee  I appreciate your comments. NAFTA certainly has done tremendous things for the Canadian economy. I believe the European negotiations are going to do so for us as well, if not do more.

Agriculture committee  We're watching the example in Australia very closely. I'm personally crossing my fingers that it turns out wonderfully, because I want to use it as a good example. We actually have very good friends who farm in Australia, so we talk with them on a regular basis about the politics

Agriculture committee  I feel as though I've done all the talking.

Agriculture committee  I think a program like that does have some merit. What I don't like.... We talked a little bit about the image of agriculture right now. And most of the time the stories the media are telling are about the handouts, the BSE crisis, the Triffid flax--all these are really crisis

Agriculture committee  We have four divisions. The farm management division, which is the three different farms, and it encompasses 40,000 acres. We process our chickpeas, lentils, and some canary seed in two facilities. We have crop production products, so we have six retail outlets that sell fuel, fe

Agriculture committee  We also run a duck and geese hunting lodge, more out of a passion for hunting, and it's something good to do in the fall. Now that we have chickpeas and lentils, our fall is virtually gone, so we don't have a lot of that any more. Both David and I work on the farm. David's brothe

Agriculture committee  Because of the calculation model they used with this five-year average, every time we expanded it just wasn't reflective of that, and we expanded every year that we were in those programs. It really became an administrative nightmare, effectively, for us to go through those kinds

Agriculture committee  We would like to see more competition. Competition is what's going to drive that market. It's beneficial for producers to have compensation. One way that we can react to that scenario of there being less and less competition is to try to counteract the fearmongering that goes on

Agriculture committee  We're also open to the idea of having this be.... There are some private programs that are out there as well. We think a really effective crop insurance program will go a long way toward helping young producers. In addition to that, if there were further insurance that we were lo