Agriculture committee  Mr. Chair, we got cut short at the end. We didn't get to say thank you either. Thank you very much for the opportunity to come on up and sit in front of you. It's been great. Hopefully we can work together with the relationships we've built even with some of you guys as we go fo

Agriculture committee  You can explain to her now that you can watch the machine so closely that you're just glued to it, and that's the truth, actually, with the potato machine. I end up looking behind me most of the day, right? I can watch the machine so closely and keep an eye on what's going on. It

Agriculture committee  There was a recognized need, I guess. I have to give our coordinator, Mr. John Phillips, who is sitting behind us here, a lot of credit. He got initiated by the minister of agriculture at the time to look into getting some growers together. He's a local guy and grew up on a farm

Agriculture committee  The more of that, the better, of course. As far as GPS is concerned within the potato industry, it's been taken on. We had the first auto-steer tractor, I think it was in 2004, on Prince Edward Island, in our operation. I went through everything you're talking about. I had all th

Agriculture committee  Anyway, today I think I know of only two or three potato farms in P.E.I. that don't have a complete auto-steer system on their planting operation. We're really pleased to see that the growers, in general, have adopted that, but I think there are more steps to be made in incentivi

Agriculture committee  We do have one individual in our province, Scott Anderson, who is tasked with starting to make the bridge and has worked closely with our group in bridging us back and forth with the researchers, but there's no official thing. That's official, I guess, but....

Agriculture committee  Maybe I'm not supposed to ask you questions, but when you talk about precision farming, are you talking about variable rate and stuff like that, or are you talking about GPS technologies and whatnot?

Agriculture committee  I don't think that's quite been decided yet on P.E.I.

Agriculture committee  We'd like to. Right now, we're working with AAFC in Charlottetown. We're working with the AC branch of Dalhousie University in Truro, and with a couple of the scientists at AAFC in Fredericton on various other projects. You asked about where we put the willows. We have one of th

Agriculture committee  Yes, it helps with erosion, and it's a natural filter before anything hits the surface water.

Agriculture committee  I don't know if the committee will allow it, but we have our project manager with us here in the crowd. She could answer that question better than either of us, but I don't know if that's.... We can answer it too, if you want.

Agriculture committee  Andrea, would you come up for a second to answer this question?

Agriculture committee  Yes. The first year, it was a $2,000 cost to us. Now it's up to $16,000. If we don't manage that and hold it, it's just going to keep going. We're working with some of the AAFC scientists on management through other crops and whatnot, but we need both tools. The other crops that

Agriculture committee  We had a field basically go completely down to it. It was a variety that we were unaware that wireworm seemed to especially like. We've since used the protectants that are available to us now and we've been able to manage that. In our studies on our own operation, wireworm is jus

Agriculture committee  Currently we're working on eight different projects with researchers from AAFC on Prince Edward Island and in Fredericton, and also a couple of different Prince Edward Island agriculture department officers and a professor from NSAC. With regard to climate change and its impact