00:04At the moment, the government is rather like a farmer who has just inherited his farm.

00:10He doesn't really know how big the farm is, perhaps doesn't know much about the soil.

00:15He hasn't got too much idea about the climate, and he's not really sure whether there's usable water.

00:22And yet, he has to make decisions that will let him plant the right seed and grow enough food to support his family.

00:31And if you think that would be a problem on an ordinary size farm, think what it would be like with a million square miles.

00:39The Canada Land Inventory is trying to tackle this problem in two ways.

00:44Firstly, it's trying to gather together the basic information that we need to know about the country.

00:51Secondly, it's trying to find out some way of handling this information.

00:57We'd like to think that we've got a system that can accept the information, can store it...

01:03...can analyze it, and present the results in a usable form.

01:08A system that can do this not in years, but in hours.

01:19Thank you very much.

01:21It's rather frightening to see yourself 40 or 50 years ago.

01:28They were wonderful years.

01:31Mr. Kennedy was in the White House.

01:34And Sputnik was in the air.

01:40Mr. Kennedy gave us a feeling that if you could think it, you could do it.

01:46The good people in the government of Canada had a need to come to grips with their farming situation and put their money behind it.

01:57I just happened to be alive in the middle of all of that.

02:01And it was...we could still call them the champagne years.

02:07And now we are 50 years on.

02:12The movie was made in '67, I started in 1960 playing around with maps and computers.

02:25I got the thing started off, but many people, particularly Jack Dangermond from 1969 on, was the guy who really put the organizational strength behind the development of the field.