Agriculture committee  To echo what was said here, and I think it was covered very well, it's about that turnaround time and how quickly we can bring a new variety to the marketplace for a farmer. Even a conventionally bred variety takes seven to nine years to bring forward. A biotech variety takes 10

Agriculture committee  In those discussions with those key trading partners, if we don't have the best system under the best science, it's very hard to wag our fingers at a trading partner and say, “You should go faster” and they say, “Well, you don't have any service standards.” You say you'll do it i

Agriculture committee  From my farming experience, I think that it changes by farm and by field, but that's what intrinsically every farmer is trying to achieve within their own subset. This ability to track and find trends and data that we couldn't find before will help them find that balance. I'll g

Agriculture committee  I don't think farmers trust anything. I think they have to test it. My dad was always that way. He would say, “This looks great. I'm going to do some alternating strips, and I'm going to prove it on my farm.” However, you need that data first to get them to buy into the test be

Agriculture committee  I grew up on a potato farm in P.E.I. and I've seen this evolve just in my lifespan. When I was young, we had the first kind of GPS mapping of our fields and it was on half-kilometre squares and now you're getting it down to applying lime where the lime spreader is changing how mu

Agriculture committee  As Dennis said earlier, we earmark a one-year turnaround time as being what is easily achievable, given that in our experience, the files typically sit for 12 months of the 24 months before they're opened anyway. If you can reduce or eliminate that backlog, you've already landed

Agriculture committee  Before I start, I'll say that I get really excited when I talk about this area. Biotechnology in crop protection is not a silver bullet. It's just a set of tools in the farmer's tool box. They need to draw on the tools from every production practice they can find in order to ge

Agriculture committee  Maybe I'll add one point to the end of that, too. We have great intellectual capital in Canada in plant breeding, within groups like the crop development centre at the University of Saskatchewan. Those groups want to get into this space of modern traits, but they are scared of t

Agriculture committee  Fair enough.

Agriculture committee  Well, I guess you can say that CRISPR is.... Conventional plant breeding has been happening for 10,000 years. The modern stuff that we're talking about and that we regulate right now has been happening in the last 50 to 60 years. CRISPR is the next 40 years. This is the new techn

Agriculture committee  I would say it's in two pieces, time and cost. It takes about two to three years to get a product approved in Canada right now. A large portion of that time is spent with the file sitting in a queue and not being looked at, sometimes for 12 months. If we could get it started fast

Agriculture committee  Thank you for the question. I think a good example is around plant biotechnology specifically and new products of biotechnology. To drive the kind of innovation we need to see, Canada has to get these tools in the hands of farmers as quickly as possible and as safely as possible