I guess there’s a couple of things that I am concerned about here that I hope will be accounted for in the work on the Agriculture Policy.
The first is, in fact, the lion’s share of Growing Forward I money actually went to Take a Kid Harvesting and it had really almost nothing to do with agriculture.
That is stealing from the intent of this fund, in my mind. I would ask that the Minister examine that closely because I know it’s amongst the people interested in developing their agricultural businesses and so on. This is a stretch. They regard this as a major stretch. In fact, somehow it is getting the lion’s share of the dollars. That’s not right. I would ask the Minister to have a close examination of that.
The other thing is the face of agriculture is changing and particularly for the North, you don’t need huge amounts of land to conduct this work. In fact, the Minister knows about the commercial greenhouse businesses derived from the space program that is extremely small but extremely productive producing tons of food in a very short time per, I think, two square metres of floor space. This is proving to be true with our producers as well. I have constituents that are well under a sixth of an acre and the department, in its policy, has established that you have to have a one-acre business. They have modified that to one-sixth of an acre, but again it doesn’t meet the needs that are out there.
Again, I would ask that the Minister examine those policies, take off the sorts of limitations, look at what’s being produced, put it on a per square metre basis, perhaps, or something like that that is more realistic, so that people can actually access these dollars. Maybe I can just get the Minister to respond on those comments. Thank you.