Agriculture committee  There are some really exciting discoveries on the horizon. Recently, the Government of Saskatchewan invested $300,000 with the Global Institute for Food Security in nitrogen-efficient wheat. This is a wheat variety that would be able to produce similar or greater yields while usi

Agriculture committee  There's absolutely an opportunity for that to occur. Again, with Canada being a regulatory role model, its recent policies on plant breeding innovation to clarify how conventional crops are bred, and gene editing and GMOs, all provide opportunities for hardier varieties that can

Agriculture committee  Thank you for that question. When speaking about crop inputs we talked about fertilizer, but when you look at seed varieties that are more hardy and resistant to deteriorating in the field and crop protection products that avoid damage to those crops so that they store well—we

Agriculture committee  If you take droughts, for example, it could be the way that the root system grows; it can also be the way that the leaf responds to the high temperatures. Closing the stoma loses less moisture out of that. Then there are also two elements: one is drought resistance, but then th

Agriculture committee  I think I can give an example from growing up on a potato farm. I know that, when we had a bad field that wasn't performing well, my dad would go with a couple of years of rye grass, plow it down and bring the organic matter back up. That's the whole idea of regenerative ag: look

Agriculture committee  Yes, I think if regenerative ag, at the end of the day, is about making your soil better than you found it, all of our tools are.... That's an agricultural goal to start with, as Ted talked about. His members are all looking to make their soil better than when they started. The

Agriculture committee  Absolutely. Thank you. One great example is just recently the Government of Saskatchewan has invested $300,000 with the Global Institute for Food Security for nitrogen efficiency. This is the tool that Mr. Graham spoke about where plant varieties can work hand in hand with the

Agriculture committee  I might add to that, Ted. You're asking great, specific questions. Stuart Smyth, a researcher at the U of S, is currently mapping a lot of these exact numbers right now through the western provinces, because we have intrinsically known a good deal of this to be true, but the spe

Agriculture committee  I would only add one anecdote. I grew up on a potato farm in Prince Edward Island. Recently, I was home and the UPEI was doing its scan of the province. Since the turn of the century, it has seen about 30% more forest in P.E.I. than there was earlier in the century. That is beca

Agriculture committee  I can take that question. Thank you very much. As you mentioned, it's great to see an investment in the regulatory structures that enable innovation in Canada, like the PMRA. However, there is concern about how that money is used and how it's invested in the system—whether it's

Agriculture committee  It's about to create a bigger barrier. I would say that the product-based approach is right. We've preached it for 25 years. We've convinced a large proportion of the world that we're right, and they're moving to product-based approaches that are better than ours. Now, if that's

Agriculture committee  From a government standpoint, this has been demonstrated as a priority. It's in the road maps, it's in the strategy tables and we have the protein industries supercluster all there. We have working groups, etc. The challenge is being as innovative with our regulatory policy as

Agriculture committee  I'm not aware of a specific one. If you have the right innovation environment, people will definitely pick that ball up and run with it. I think we see those examples. Right now I can list 15 new varieties that are under development in the United States and almost none in Canada

Agriculture committee  Yes, it's understanding what a plant is capable of and using that as a barometer of when you need to look and when you don't. Other countries are lining up behind that. Europe published their food safety report two weeks ago that said gene editing provides no additional risk abov

Agriculture committee  I think, if you're speaking of labelling specifically, of how we label products, it's important to preserve the Canadian approach that we mandatorily label for food and safety issues: food, nutrition and safety. Once you move to consumer preference issues, then you're no longer p