Fewer retired farmers to help at harvest | ‘Where do we get replacements who know what they’re doing?’
While the critical shortage of agricultural labour in Canada typically is described as largely an issue for labour-intensive operations in Central Canada, the prairie grain industry is not immune.
“It isn’t just about horticulture and intensive operations like fruit and vegetables in Ontario,” Don Connick, a Gull Lake, Sask., crop and livestock producer, said during the recent annual Canadian Agricultural Human Resources Council forum in Ottawa.
“There also is a huge looming problem in the grain industry,” said the Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan director. “There is a labour crisis looming in the grain industry because we need help during the harvest and it used to be retired farmers. They know how to run a combine but there increasingly are fewer of those around. Where do we get replacements who know what they’re doing?”
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During the conference, retired Statistics Canada rural researcher and analyst Ray Bollman said Canadian agriculture reports 122,000 paid workers — 89,000 permanent and an average of 33,000 seasonal.
He said mechanization on farms is reducing the number of farm labourers needed.
Bollman said the median full-time wage on farms is $15 per hour and the median wage for part-time workers is $12.
However, while Newfoundland farmer Merv Wiseman, chair of the CAHRC, acknowledged that mechanization is reducing the number of farm workers needed, it does not solve the problem.
“That also raises the bar on the skills needed for workers because we need people who actually can manage that technology.”
He said the agricultural industry continues to face a “looming crisis” of tens of thousands of farm worker positions unfilled because of the increasing difficulty of finding people with the needed skills willing to work on a farm.
“There’s no doubt a huge gap still exists,” he said in an interview.
During a presentation last year to the House of Commons human resources, skills and development committee, Wiseman said all agricultural sectors report worker shortages already with the problem poised to grow.
He said farm employers increasingly rely on the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program to import temporary foreign workers who are “deemed reliable, motivated and efficient.”
During the meeting, the emphasis was on how to motivate young people and Canadian workers to join the agricultural workforce, how to motivate workers to stay and how to in-corporate positive messages about agriculture and the need to learn agricultural skills in school curricula.
Sheila Jones, director of the horticulture and cross-sectoral division within Agriculture Canada, said her work as co-chair of the labour task force indicates labour needs are a huge issue across the industry.
She said the cross-sectoral labour task force has been encouraging participants “not just to whine but to come up with solutions.”
She said a report for Agriculture Canada’s deputy minister on labour issues and solutions is scheduled for presentation in October.
