Environment committee  Have a national youth expeditionary force, but the expeditions are within Canada. Keep it cheap. Get kids out. A lot of kids in the city don't get the chance to get out, so you have to do something about it.

Environment committee  In answer to your question, incentives can be varied, and I think you have to look at specific examples. Briefly, to try to provide some framework for going forward, the incentive has to somehow at least match the cost incurred. In our case we have seed, equipment, time, labour

Environment committee  Precisely. It could be a tax credit, or perhaps a cost-share payment. With a specific look at the fisheries habitat on private farmland where riparian corridors are moving through, many farmers are hesitant to enact all the management necessary to maintain those corridors because

Environment committee  Yes, we're trying to get more into that. We rely on a lot of citizen science. There are some coastal water bird counts that Bird Studies Canada has been coordinating. There are Christmas bird counts. We don't formally run them, but we definitely take advantage of the data that's

Environment committee  Do you mean how the programs are targeted?

Environment committee  I mentioned two. I mentioned the winter cover crop program and the grassland set-aside program, our two largest programs. We also have a hedgerow program for native trees and shrubs along the margins of fields. We have a grass margins programs, which is kind of a mix of set-aside

Environment committee  Yes. We've been working since 1993. It is getting close to 20 years that we have been conducting this work. Part of our work has been assessing how well some of these programs have worked in acting as habitat. Indeed the area, because of the high-quality adjacent tidal marsh ha

Environment committee  We have approximately 40 farming operations involved in the program on an annual basis. Usually, within our grasslands set-aside program, 20 farmers are enrolled in that program on an annual basis, given the limitations of the program's capacity and the wait-list we have for th

Environment committee  I would say in total there are probably close to 80 farming operations of different sizes and scope. Some of the farms that we do not cooperate very heavily with are blueberry farms, because there's a perennial crop already in the ground. We have other activities we can do on t

Environment committee  I'm sorry, I didn't get that last one. Can we get programs that apply to all farmers? If that's what you're asking, there are different ways of doing it. Not all farm operations are compatible with this kind of conservation. The big thing to point out is that the big vegetable

Environment committee  It varies. In these areas, I think sometimes you can line up the benefits versus the costs accrued. My speculation is that indeed there is a one-for-one return. You can't overwork these soils in perpetuity. They break down too quickly, and you need to rebuild that structure. That

Environment committee  Are you talking about a benefit to the community in terms of conservation?

Environment committee  In general, the community as a whole is a lot more accepting of the farming operations when they can see that these farmers are taking an active role in wildlife conservation. Not many other landowners have the capacity to enact that kind of wildlife conservation. We can all pu

Environment committee  Yes, to answer that question, we have to go back in time to how the trust formed. But essentially, it was a group of farmers and conservationists who came together when some money was made available through the expansion of the Vancouver International Airport. Compensation money

Environment committee  I'd say that a lot of those farmers like seeing wildlife, so that's pretty rewarding for them. There is that reward.