Agriculture committee  Okay.

Agriculture committee  Okay.

Agriculture committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Miller. All of you have a copy of my presentation. I was really looking at this as an opportunity to talk about some of the trends I see and some of the things I think we need to be thinking about looking forward. First, when we talk about Canada's fo

Agriculture committee  We do distinct executive development courses of one week each. You come, you live with us, and—

Agriculture committee  Yes. At the University of Guelph you can also do an online MBA in agribusiness. There are those kinds of things, as well. Both of those are important to the future. A lot of the farmers I see think of their business as a business. They really do.

Agriculture committee  Actually, at Ivey we do. We run a grower university for Syngenta. They bring in some of their farmers. They stay with us and learn about financial management, planning, and things like that. We have also just developed a strategic agriculture leaders program, which is to teach le

Agriculture committee  I come from a business school. I view farming as a business, and I viewed farming as a business when I was farming.

Agriculture committee  That's a really interesting comment because the crop insurance program works well; it's responsive, it's fairly fast, and it's well understood. Producers are generally happy with that particular program. The AgriInvest program, again, is very easy to understand because you get a

Agriculture committee  I'm sure we could talk about this all day.

Agriculture committee  Very much so. The agriculture and food sectors lag behind everybody else when it comes to using information technology. The fight against traceability to me is ridiculous. It helps identify your product as organic or local, which gives you a brand advantage. It also gives you goo

Agriculture committee  I'd say it's a reaction to the reality of the situation. If you need $5 million to get into business, you probably aren't going to have it if you're 26, 28 years old. People in other businesses lease factories, lease equipment. In agriculture we've always had the view that you ne

Agriculture committee  Okay, very briefly. I'll do two levels. On food processing, I think that programs to help people invest in new technology and new methods like lean manufacturing and so on are very important. At the farm level, I have two things to say: Productivity is inputs over outputs, or o

Agriculture committee  What is obvious to me is that small farms need different kinds of things from larger farms, so they need help accessing markets. That can be help with setting up networks, and also help with understanding how consumers are shifting, becoming more multinational, and so on. There

Agriculture committee  Land costs have gone up quite a bit over the last few years and land just continues to increase. Now, in our area it's not nearly like that; it's more in the $10,000-to-$13,000 range. But still, if you put together a 200-acre parcel, that's a pretty significant chunk. On top of

Agriculture committee  No. Actually, what you're starting to see, and you're seeing this out west particularly, is venture capital firms starting to say, “If you need 4,000 acres and you have 1,000, we'll buy the other 3,000 and lease it back to you”. There's a company in—