Agriculture committee  As far as I know, the yields are more than sufficient to support the growers. If the yields are less, and the input costs are insignificant, the farmers still make more money. They have enough acreage in Brazil, I guarantee you that, to find as much as they need. Let me just add one thing.

Agriculture committee  The people who developed the grafted plants were the Israelis. They developed them because they don't have water. They graft watermelons, cantaloupes, cucumbers, and all of these plants. Grafted plants cost about four times more than a non-grafted plant, so it's very substantial as far as that goes.

Agriculture committee  Yesterday, I gave a lecture at the University of Guelph about my vision of the new green revolution. It's stolen from the Brazilian sugar cane industry. In 1971, a lady named Johanna Döbereiner was tasked with developing Brazil's independence from importing oil. She did something so revolutionary that we in Canada would fall down just hearing it.

Agriculture committee  We're a year-old company, so we're just staffing and equipping, but we are ready to do diagnostic tests for growers as far as diseases and other factors that go along with that. But as far as the research, we have about five programs. One is with Australia, looking at root-soil health as a factor in the production of potatoes; we have some work with the University of Guelph and the tomato growers of Ontario, and we're looking at some ornamental production with trees.

Agriculture committee  All our tests are on farmers' fields. Our program will be directly linked to questions growers bring to our company, and everything will be done in those situations where they're having crop losses. The idea will be to get an idea of the distribution of pathogens across the field and how they relate to A&L;'s business of looking at chemical fertility.

Agriculture committee  The GMO crop, I think the panel here has said, has to be considered on a crop-by-crop basis. The place that I have seen the greatest impact on the benefits of GMO crops has been on GMO cotton. I have gone to places in Russia and the former Soviet Union where they used enormous amounts of pesticides.

Agriculture committee  Thank you for that. I've had an opportunity to pretty well travel the whole world and look at issues related to agriculture, and one of the greatest threats we have coming in the next decade is global climate change. It's certainly going to be a major factor, as it is already happening in many parts of the world.

Agriculture committee  To give you an example, in the Pacific Northwest, Jim Cook's group identified that a very serious disease of wheat, called Take-All, could be controlled by consecutive cropping of wheat, rather than a rotation cropping. After 50 years of research, this group discovered that the primary mechanism for this is the build-up of a specific group of bacteria called pseudomonas.

Agriculture committee  Thank you very much. We really appreciate being invited here. A&L; Canada Laboratories was primarily an organization that dealt with the examination of chemical constituents used in agriculture: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Over the years there has been a lot greater demand from growers as to things like diagnostics of plant diseases.