Bill C-18 committee  I'll be real quick. On malt barley, the malters are not very keen to move away from certain varieties because of the taste of beer, to put it simply. They don't want to start with new varieties. Any new varieties, though, are far higher yield, with even better disease packages.

Bill C-18 committee  Malt barley has expanded on my farm. The CashPlus program that came out with the Wheat Board was a step in the right direction, though only partially. But they gave us a price up front, and that's what's most important to us. We cannot have uncertainty as far as what price we wil

Bill C-18 committee  Yes, just like in any business, for me as a farmer, cashflow is number one on my farm. With the Wheat Board, cashflow is impossible. You get a price at the beginning of the year and you're not sure that's going stay. It could drop. It could go up. It could do whatever. You don't

Agriculture committee  Yes. That's a fair statement, for sure.

Agriculture committee  I just did it the other day. I sat down with my maps and decided what I was going to grow. The first thing you do is plug in where you're going to put all your canola. You try to force those acres in. Then you think about malt barley and wheat and durum. You're guessing which one

Agriculture committee  No.

Agriculture committee  The number one priority is always research. We need more and more research, public and private. That's our number one thing. Any money that goes into that—I'm not sure what the number would be—can come back twentyfold, tenfold. That's what's most important, for sure.

Agriculture committee  Prices have come up a long way; that's been a huge difference. Speaking specifically to canola, there's absolutely no doubt—you can talk to every farmer in western Canada—that canola pays the bills. As I mentioned, we can't ship a lot of our other stuff. It's because of the val

Agriculture committee  Yes, at the Grain Growers of Canada, our policy has always been free markets. So, yes, we would support that.

Agriculture committee  I can only compare it to how we grow canola and specialty crops. We would be able to forward contract; that would be one of the big ones. We'd be able to know our risks a lot better that way, because we'd have a kind of final price and a delivery window. The biggest thing right

Agriculture committee  I think it's important with a regulatory system, as far as private research goes, that some of these companies are around the world. The head of Canada per se has to fight for research dollars for Canada. If we know the right regulatory system, he doesn't get those research dolla

Agriculture committee  From a farmer's standpoint, everything will be more targeted in the future. The fertilizers, the technology, and the seed, everything's going to be targeted to be far more efficient. As far as what we're going to grow, for me, farming is a business. I'm going to grow something th

Agriculture committee  Well, on my farm, we push rotations now to put more and more canola in. We rent land. We'll pay more money for land that has had canola on it so we can grow canola. We'll make deals with, say, feedlots that don't grow canola. We can take their land, and we'll exchange so we can g

Agriculture committee  Well, it's interesting that the harsher the growing season...the yields. People are actually growing canola now in southwest Saskatchewan when they never grew it before because it would burn up. Now, with the new varieties, that's what people put in first, because they'll handle

Agriculture committee  I guess the biggest problem is the Wheat Board, essentially. It's been very difficult. And it's not what you would think normally. It's the monopoly, the Wheat Board's monopoly, not being able to forward price and not being able to take the risk out. You know, they come out with