What my partners at J.D. Irving, Limited, and I have been able to do over a long period of time is ask the question, “Can we produce trees that are somewhat more tolerant of the spruce budworm?”

Spruce budworm is the most damaging insect pest of the conifer forest across Canada. It will outright kill large areas of forest. When Dr. Miller came to us in 1998 with his knowledge of perhaps increasing the tolerance of the trees that we planted, J.D. Irving was quite interested.

Some plants allow fungi to live inside them without causing damage. Fungi are eaten by insects and arthropods in nature for their protein. Fungi don't like that, so they make toxins to essentially discourage insects from eating. So I wanted to go and do the experiment: could we re-infect seedlings? Which is just basically taking nature and putting it back into nature. Within two years, we're able to say, “Yeah, we can do this.”

A company typically produces anywhere between 13 and 20 million spruce seedlings in the run of a year. All the spruce seedlings that we grow today have been inoculated with different strains of these fungi. There's been substantial amount of resources that have been invested into the science to get it to where it is today. The laboratory facility that we're filming in today was developed specifically to further promote some aspects of biosciences that are important to the company's business.

The reason this is a success is that people with the maximum know-how, growing trees of the type that I was interested in in the Acadian forest, participated not just in a passive way but in an active way with their expertise.