Agriculture committee  I'll simply touch on carcass information from RFID. It's very limited, but the producers that do have access to that service from a packer.... Very few lambs are being graded, but for the ones that are, being able to get information back on an individual basis.... I know maybe fo

Agriculture committee  Right back to the primary producer, exactly. If it's gone through a feedlot, we have a similar situation where there are some problems with privacy, of course, being able to share that information. However, we're working through that through different agreements, I guess. Second

Agriculture committee  No, I think I'm good. I certainly appreciate the opportunity to come here and answer the questions. Thank you.

Agriculture committee  For sure, thank you. Two working groups were created, coming out of last fall's sheep value chain round table, one was the expansion working group. They have just started to establish action items or limiting factors on expansion. As a result, one of those is the access to medi

Agriculture committee  We recently learned, through working with the Canadian Animal Health Institute as well as the veterinary and drug directorate, that we're researching all those things, actually. Whether we're able to use the science from there depends on what is approved in another country and wh

Agriculture committee  I would say that just having the whole value chain at the same table is a huge one for the sheep industry. It's not really something we've done before, or if we have attempted it before, we haven't done a very good job of it. We really do have everyone from the value chain there.

Agriculture committee  Sure. Thanks for that question. Most of the slaughter capacity is in Ontario and Quebec, most of it being in Ontario. Most of the consumption is also in Ontario. Although not having as much federal slaughter as we would like to have creates a little bit of a problem, not being

Agriculture committee  Specifically, in British Columbia, they're in a significant deficit production situation considering the population that we have in Victoria and Vancouver, and the demand there far outstrips the supply.

Agriculture committee  In the short term, yes, but it would depend on the level of expansion that we experience as we move forward.

Agriculture committee  The problem is much deeper than labelling for us. It's more of a supply problem because of lack of supply. We have very little federal slaughter on the lamb side of the business in Canada. It's almost non-existent, really. In order to be in those large grocery store chains, you

Agriculture committee  Because of the lack of volume that we have in the sheep industry in Canada, we have no dedicated plants specifically for lamb slaughter. We do have a plant in western Canada that has a specific kill line for lamb, but they go into a central portion of the slaughter plant after th

Agriculture committee  It would maybe be a little bit premature—we've really only had one official meeting, and one the year before that was just getting the ball rolling—but for us, just having the whole value chain together around a table, just that in itself is a big deal, because we really are quit

Agriculture committee  Thank you for the question. There's an initiative under way right now out of Saskatchewan, a co-operative that wants to pool lambs together to create a central distribution of lambs that would primarily go through federal slaughter so they'd be available for wider distribution a

Agriculture committee  Thank you. I'm here to talk about the sheep value chain round table. I will begin with just a little bit of background. The main goal of the sector is to create a profitable industry that encompasses all areas of the supply chain. Presently, the supply chain is fragmented and n