Agriculture committee  Okay, I'll take the first stab and let John think about his response while I fluster away. My own personal experience with this is through this NGO called FarmStart, which has worked actively to link farmers at the end of their life, who don't have an obvious heir—and there is a

Agriculture committee  I feel a little nervous stepping into an argument about regulation and inspection in this particular millieu. The point I would like to make is a more general one, and it's that we need to think more flexibly about what sort of mid-size processing infrastructure would allow for

Agriculture committee  Thank you very much for the question. In my opinion, the critical bottleneck in meeting this rising demand for ethnocultural foods sits at both the farm and the processing level. Specifically, having the farmers who are tooled up and prepared and able to meet these markets—even

Agriculture committee  Yes, there are tested and viable models based on this notion of a food hub. It allows a group of farmers to come together into some centralized infrastructure, not unlike the Toronto Food Terminal, and provide a degree of collective action for small amounts of processing, aggrega

Agriculture committee  I'd be happy to do that.

Agriculture committee  Thank you very much. I can hear you fine. Can you hear me okay?

Agriculture committee  Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you again. I have to preface my comments. When the invitation to speak arrived last week, I undertook some conversations with some colleagues. So some credit is due to John Smithers, Rod MacRae, and Phil Mount for what I'm about to say,

Agriculture committee  It's a wonderful question. Thank you for that. The green revolution technologies, which are ubiquitous and miraculous in the west, were developed with a number of assumptions that were perfectly legitimate. The scientists who developed the hybridized seeds, etc., assumed that fa

Agriculture committee  I'll chip in here, if that's okay, and reflect on my experience of working for much of the last 10 years in the U.K., where there were a number of interdisciplinary programs designed to link industry and academics and a range of stakeholders on agricultural themes. There was the

Agriculture committee  Thank you very much for that. From my perspective, some of the most important things come from adding value to ecosystem services and to public goods. So I think there's an enormous amount of important fundamental research...and then turning that fundamental research into appli

Agriculture committee  The short answer, I'm afraid, is both. The agricultural side of it is this. What are the engineering facilities? What are the technologies that are required to store that kind of food? Should that food be stored close to farmers or should it be stored close to consumers? But then

Agriculture committee  I'll come back to my point that I think confirms what we just heard. I think obviously the Canadian agricultural system is geared towards export. I think it will increasingly orient itself towards that, and I think that's appropriate. Simultaneously, I think we need to be maintai

Agriculture committee  Thank you for that question, and thank you for drawing attention to that example. That is, as you said, a small-scale example of a piece of technology that was developed in partnership between western academics and small-scale farmers in India. It was designed to overcome a loca

Agriculture committee  Fair enough. Thanks for that. The point I'd like to link to innovation, though, is that we need to develop a broad range of policy platforms in order to prepare for what many business experts and scientists are describing as an extraordinary crisis that seems to be unfolding. Th

Agriculture committee  I passed along some brief illustrations that I was going to use for my talk. Do you have access to those in front of you, or should I just go without them?