Changing face of rural West West faces tougher fight for labour than East, U.S. Midwest due to rural depopulation
To people outside agriculture – and even to some farmers – the aggressive purchase of land and half-million dollar equipment by many farmers can seem foolhardy and reckless.
But it’s a classic, reasonable, rational response to situations like the “Dutch disease” that is affecting the Prairies, according to many economic authorities.
Developing hyper-efficient farms employing less and less labour is the best way to deal with high labour and high input costs.
And on the Prairies, farmers may have no other choice than embracing high-tech solutions because labour often isn’t only expensive, but can be entirely absent.
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“The labour is scarce because there just isn’t much of it,” said agricultural economist Al Mussel of the George Morris Centre.
“It’s not just expensive. You actually might not even be able to find people to hire.”
Mussel said Western Canada faces a tougher fight for labour than eastern Canada or the U.S. Midwest because of generations of rural depopulation. Towns have shrinking populations, there are fewer farms every decade, so there are fewer local people for remaining farmers to attempt to employ.
The situation has been greatly exacerbated in the past decade by the boom in the Western oilpatch, which offers labourers high wages in nearby areas. That has lured thousands of potential farm workers out of local farming areas towards places like Fort McMurray.
Farmers can respond by working longer and harder, scaling back activities, or finding ways to do more personally and with reduced work forces.
Economists say the latter in most industries involves employing technology to replace workers. Larger tractors and combines maximize the production of any individual farmer, and technologies such as glyphosate-resistant crops reduce the number of field operations necessary for in-crop management.
Mussel said the recent run on labour caused by the oilpatch just exacerbates a trend that has always been present in the West.
“In a way, labour was always scarce and expensive,” said Mussel.
“A lot of the story of agriculture in Western Canada is the story of technology that will substitute for labour.”
Most individual commercial farms have increased the size of land and equipment to produce more with less labour.
Others have looked to new pools of labour and brought in workers from non-traditional places.
The dairy industry is famous for its dynamic embrace of robotics and high-tech solutions to replace barn labour. Mussel noted that many robotic systems common in Canadian barns today are from manufacturers in the Netherlands, where labour has been expensive and scarce for decades. However, in recent years some farmers have embraced a low-tech approach to the unwillingness of Dutch people to work in dairy barns.
A Dutch colleague told him: “Our solution to the labour problem is Poland.”
Polish workers have embraced their freedom from communism by spreading across Western Europe to work in industries shunned by Western Europeans.
Mussel said prairie farmers don’t appear to have as easy a pool of extra labour to access as Dutch farmers, so farmers are likely to continue to reinvest in land and equipment in order to avoid labour problems and pressures.
