Agriculture committee  It has put higher demands on the maintenance side of our operations. So far we've been fortunate. We have built a real good team of mechanics and programmers, but as we grow we need more and more of them, and the other manufacturers in this area are looking for the same people. I

Agriculture committee  Yes, definitely that's what we would like to see, long term, that they actually would become part of the community.

Agriculture committee  Like I mentioned before, it's just that continued support that we did have. We were able to take advantage of the latest funding that had mentioned the expiry of December 30. We just came in under the wire for a major robotic palletizer, which was a $400,000 capital expenditure,

Agriculture committee  We're fairly new to the foreign workers. We just brought our first nine people in from Mexico, and they've been at our production facility for about four weeks now. So far they've integrated with our local staff quite well. I guess there is, longer term, a need to get that numbe

Agriculture committee  The bigger challenge right now is that we have to provide them housing, because there's a shortage of housing in our area. We're looking at building some housing in order to increase that amount. As soon as we know we can cover off the housing, we'll be putting in an application

Agriculture committee  Yes, the longer the term is, the better, because currently there are some very intelligent people within that group who we can train to do higher skilled jobs. We've seen that even with these first nine people we've put in the plant. Some of them have the ability to be team leads

Agriculture committee  I guess it's just that we have some key people who have stayed with the business from day one, so it's more working with each other and picking the key people in order to get the knowledge, the handle, to look after some of the new technology that comes our way. It definitely can

Agriculture committee  In most of our applications, we have hired technical people for certain positions, and then we rely on them to cross-train others. It's still a major investment, and we have to make sure that they're looked after to keep them in place so that they don't move on. Overall, with lab

Agriculture committee  Two of the major constraints that we have.... Labour was one that I highlighted. The other is that the main product we produce would be mostly frozen, baked apple pies that we sell to retail chain stores throughout Canada and the U.S. Mostly on the U.S. side, it's heavy concentra

Agriculture committee  Yes, I would think that eventually we would want to be looking at probably upwards of 40% in total, if our labour trends continue the way they have in the last five or six years.

Agriculture committee  That is fair, I guess. I just want to point out the fact that in our success for having capital available to us in rural Nova Scotia, they definitely met those requirements. As we go forward, we'd like to see that was still available to us.

Agriculture committee  I guess it's continued support for us for that funding that's become available. I know we received some through the agri-food fund for different automated projects that we've done. It's just that continual support and new programs to help us keep our plant modern and keep investi

Agriculture committee  On the agricultural side, our apple production side, it's totally crucial for them to have both the harvest labour and also labour earlier in the year for pruning and so on. There are definitely advantages. The longer they can bring up the temporary workers, the cheaper it would

Agriculture committee  Yes, particularly last fall it would have helped us pick up a few more millions of sales. We could have transferred some from our farming operations into our plant for the November-December time frame. We would have picked up sales that we shorted due to lack of labour.

Agriculture committee  Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for the invitation. I'm Jeff Sarsfield, president of Apple Valley. We're located in Kentville, Nova Scotia. We started the business back in 2000. We're a frozen fruit pie supplier, shipping all across Canada and the U.S. We mostly concentrate on