Your reading list

Ag has difficulty attracting workers

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Published: March 11, 2010

A senior official with the Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council says action to avert a looming workforce crisis in agriculture is moving too slowly.

CAHRC executive director Danielle Vignette said a strategy to recruit, train and retain farm workers is beginning to emerge.

“I would say it is inching along, not nearly as quickly as I would like to see,” she said.

In a 2009 report, the council said agriculture has a difficult time competing with other sectors to attract employees and it is only going to get worse.

Read Also

 clubroot

Going beyond “Resistant” on crop seed labels

Variety resistance is getting more specific on crop disease pathogens, but that information must be conveyed in a way that actually helps producers make rotation decisions.

It estimated that more than 41,000 full-time and seasonal job positions were unfilled in 2009.

As well, farmers surveyed said the sector will have to fill 51,000 full-time positions and almost 39,000 season positions over the next three years.

“This is a real problem for us, no doubt about it,” said Canadian Federation of Agriculture president Laurent Pellerin. “It is a challenge we have to face.”

Many farmers look to the federal government’s temporary foreign workers program to meet their seasonal employee needs. Some farm organizations are pressing Ottawa to expand the program by changing the immigration points system to give more weight to foreign workers with the skills needed to fill seasonal or full-time agriculture jobs.

At its late February annual meeting, the CFA approved a resolution calling on the CAHRC to create a manual on offshore worker programs that can be sent to Canadian farmers instructing them on how to use the program and how to train employees.

Vinette said the council is also trying to convince the federal human resources and skills development department to update its definition of employment opportunities that exist in agriculture.

“The matrix they have now is very outdated, stressing more the manual labour side,” she said.

“Did you know that agriculture does not employ managers? They are not mentioned in the department’s list.”

The CAHRC report, Labour Market Information on Recruitment and Retention in Primary Agriculture, cited two key reasons for the difficulty in filling farm jobs: poor human resource planning skills by farm managers and a poor image for agriculture.

Farmers often do not know how to go about looking for workers.

“While research confirmed that almost all farm establishments have or will have a need for more workers, it also identified significant gaps in the sector’s human resource capacity,” the report said.

“For example, only 25 percent of employers have a human resource plan and a third are not undertaking specific activities to recruit or retain workers.”

Agriculture’s image as an appealing workplace is another big problem.

Vinette said trying to convince the government to update its view of jobs available in the sector is part of the process of changing the image.

“I’m a firm believer that if we elevate the level of the industry as far as the kinds of jobs people can aspire to, it would go a long way to changing the image,” she said.

When the George Morris Centre in Guelph, Ont., reviewed sector human resource issues, “the message was loud and clear that image is an issue.”

Pellerin agreed.

“It is difficult to compete for workers when they conclude that taking a job in the city means working less and getting paid more.”

As part of the effort to change the image, the Canadian 4-H Council last week announced a website at www.careersonthegrow.ca that will advertise job opportunities in the sector.

As well, the Canadian Association of Diploma in Agriculture Programs (CADAP) is launching a national campaign to convince more young people to receive an education that will equip them to work in the sector. Part of the Ditch the Office program will be more promotion of the diversity of jobs available.

“The agriculture industry is constantly asking for more grads from agricultural colleges and universities across the country,” CADAP president Lauranne Sanderson from the Nova Scotia Agriculture College said in a news release announcing the program.

“Nationally, there are probably four jobs for every student that walks out of our schools with a diploma in hand.”

explore

Stories from our other publications