Thank you, Bev. Those are good questions.
Of course, in the budget there was a lot more for agriculture than just what was under the agricultural headline. There was broadband Internet for those farmers outside the Canadian Wheat Board who access their markets and sell into them on their own. There was infrastructure. Of course, you can't haul load after load to market over bad roads and not destroy your truck. From the tax standpoint, of course, farmers are small-businessmen as well, so changes we saw in the tax rates--they can now earn another $100,000 and stay within the small-business tax framework--are very beneficial to farmers; they keep them building their economy. Access to credit is exceptionally important. We've done that with additions to EDC, the Export Development Corporation, which large processors and so forth use to backstop. Of course this has made their marketplace more accessible to farmers.
As you rightly point out, with changes to FIMCLA, the farm income marketing system.... With the average age of farmers across this country approaching retirement age--60-plus--we have to start getting our heads around the idea that it's the new and beginning farmers who need to come in to take over. The only way we can drive that is with black ink on the bottom line. The ledger has to be profitable. We're seeing those changes coming as new farmers come in and look at new ways to do things.
Agricultural flexibility in partnership with FIMCLA will allow us to do that. Of course, it's very tough to get credit when you're beginning a new business--it just is--and agriculture is no exception to that. We're making $25 million available to new farmers over five years through FIMCLA to make sure they have access to that, to lever that money and get involved with farm credit. We have some great programs for new farmers as well.
AgriFlex we will build on. We need a proactive pillar, as I outlined in my opening remarks. We do have a good solid business-risk set of pillars, even for new farmers, with the averages we allow them to take automatically and with negative margins being covered, and so forth. Even if they have a bad couple of years off the hop, it's not going to take them down.
AgriFlex allows us to build on that with commercialization of new ideas. New technologies that are out there will lower the cost of inputs. There are new fertilizers coming on board. There are new generics out there. This department has been very solid in funding the background checks on chemicals and pesticides going to PMRA. We've done the work and handed them the package and said, here, get this done, because it's in the best interests of our horticulture industry and our grains industry. We've had some success with that. We're doing the same type of thing with veterinary drugs, again under Health Canada. Those types of things need to be available to our farmers so that the playing field is as level as we can make it. Being able to fund those types of things under a proactive program like agricultural flexibility benefits everybody.