Agriculture committee  I think a lot of the mental health challenges would be shared. They both have to deal with weather challenges. There are a lot of things out of their control. When we're talking about sheep specifically, it's a commodity-based pricing system. You have no control over your pricing

Agriculture committee  We've taken money out of our research funding to support Dr. Jones-Bitton's work, and we are providing a lot of in-kind time to help her build her central hub at the University of Guelph. I'll be honest. In the beginning, it was hard to find the funding, because farmers like to

Agriculture committee  I'll start. I work with an 11-person board, and four of our board members are women under the age of 45. We did a master shepherd's course for farmers who had been farming sheep for three to nine years, and 60% of the participants were women. By far, it's changing the way we ar

Agriculture committee  Go ahead, Rebecca.

Agriculture committee  I have nothing to add. That was really eloquent, Rebecca.

Agriculture committee  I want to make sure I understand the question. Do you want specific examples of what our farmers are doing?

Agriculture committee  I want to add that I think this is where Dr. Jones-Bitton's work really comes in handy. She's been doing a lot of participatory research with farmers and is advocating for a centre of research, a central hub in Guelph where we can talk to farmers and make sure that the programmin

Agriculture committee  There are a couple of pretty creative things that we could do. For instance, one of the research projects we're looking into right now is working with conservation groups that are interested in grassland habitat so that they understand from an urban perspective the importance of

Agriculture committee  In our context around the sheep table, it's a bit different. I have four board members who have dealt with suicide since January, whether it was that of another farmer they knew or somebody within their small community. Around our board table, the discussion is perhaps a bit diff

Agriculture committee  Sure. There are a couple of different examples. One is that specifically when we are dealing with ruminant agriculture, people think that grazing cows and sheep is ruining the environment. They'll say that they don't want to be grazing animals anymore. Really, when we're grazin

Agriculture committee  I'm here this morning on behalf of the Ontario Sheep Farmers. Thank you for the opportunity to be here today to talk about farmer mental health. Ontario Sheep Farmers represents 3,000 farmers, who contribute over $465 million to Ontario's economy. Ontario is home to the country'