Your comments brought me back a bit to my practice as a lawyer when I was doing wills and a lot of farmers from around Guelph would come in to see me. We were always in that predicament of having to leave the farm to one child, while all the other children were deprived, really, of inheriting in the estate or would be owed monumental amounts of money by the one child you leave the farm to. It seemed to me that you had to be in a family that had one child in order to go into farming or you were out of luck.
This theme was repeated over the last several weeks when we were travelling across Canada. I think none of us can deny that it's an issue. And while some may be enthusiastic about farming, I have to tell you I came off that tour almost depressed when it comes to the future of farming in Canada and the inability to deal with the lack of harmonization of regulations, etc., etc.
Some people out there said that if we're not careful rural areas will become ghost towns. I'm really worried about our ability to maintain food sovereignty in this country. I'm seriously worried about it. I think all of us around this committee want to work together to stop that from happening, to stop us losing our food sovereignty. It doesn't matter what your political party is.
Chan, we do work together on a lot of things, believe me.
Having said that, Jill, I met with the Canadian Livestock Genetics Association last week. I was surprised when they said that very few farmers actually take advantage of genetics, and that it's possibly because of a lack of understanding in improving their beef and dairy herd and their productivity, and, in some cases, it's the cost of farm genetics.
I'm wondering if you can enlighten me on that briefly, because I do have another question.