Agriculture committee I do. It's interesting that everybody is mentioning Saskatoon and Guelph. What you're talking about is cluster developments, really. The cluster in Saskatoon was developed about 30 years ago with defined Saskatchewan government direction. They said “We are going to be the crop biotech leaders globally.”
February 9th, 2011Committee meeting
Dr. John Kelly
Agriculture committee You can pick the energy crops. Miscanthus is not native here. How do we de-risk the timeframe required for growers to put miscanthus in?
February 9th, 2011Committee meeting
Dr. John Kelly
Agriculture committee No. It's for crops that have no history of use, right?
February 9th, 2011Committee meeting
Dr. John Kelly
Agriculture committee Part of it is money and having the ability to finance from that valley of death on. I know that Agriculture and Agri-food Canada tried to get some Canadian people to take a chance on this. They weren't successful. I don't know the reasons for the lack of success in finding investors, but they were able to find those investors easier in the U.S.
February 9th, 2011Committee meeting
Dr. John Kelly
Agriculture committee It comes when somebody has proof of concept. They know it works, but they cannot get to the manufacturing phase. Typically you have university and government funding to get to that proof-of-concept stage, and then you have to try to attract some funding from the private capital market, the angel markets, or the venture markets.
February 9th, 2011Committee meeting
Dr. John Kelly
Agriculture committee I would be happy to talk about that. Do we need a department of commercialization? I think we have much better success when we put commercialization into the hands of people who can actually commercialize. That's why I'm supportive of organizations like BioEnterprise, for example.
February 9th, 2011Committee meeting
Dr. John Kelly
Agriculture committee I will.
February 9th, 2011Committee meeting
Dr. John Kelly
Agriculture committee So the message of LSO is simple: we need to work together. Thank you.
February 9th, 2011Committee meeting
Dr. John Kelly
Agriculture committee Thank you, Chairman Miller. I'm going to give you a little bit of background on myself first, because of the context of this morning's conversation. Previous to being with the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers' Association, I was head of regulatory affairs and technical development for a major crop protection company.
February 9th, 2011Committee meeting
Dr. John Kelly