Technological advancements and the changing definition of a farmer may be the reasons for the population decline in Canada’s agricultural community.
According to the 2006 census findings released by Statistics Canada, farmers are the oldest workforce in Canada. Farmers and farm managers older than 55 make up 42 percent of all Canadian farmers.
The median age for farmers in 2006 was 52 compared to a median age of 51 in 2001. These numbers were especially high in the western provinces, with the median being 54 for Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia. The median age for the Canadian workforce in general was 41 in 2006.
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“It takes two or three (farmers to retire) for one new person to get started,” said Ray Bollman of Statistics Canada.
According to the most recent census, there are 0.3 farmers between the ages of 20 and 34 for every farmer of retirement age.
The farmer population has been on the decline since the Second World War. While this may seem like a problem, it could be that Canada doesn’t need as many farmers as it used to. Advancements in farming implements and techniques have reduced the number of people needed to run a large operation, and may even mean that farmers are retiring at a later age than previous generations.
In the past, the median age dropped every 30 years as farmers retired and their sons or daughters took over their land, said Bollman. The median age dropped in 1921, 1951 and 1981. Although he was expecting to see the numbers start going down as early as 2006, that wasn’t the case.
“Sooner or later those older folks will retire and there will be a higher share of young operators, but (in the past) it was people who walked behind horses, manually lifted hay, rode in bumpy tractors without air conditioning,” said Bollman.
He expects modern machinery has made it easier for older farmers to stay.
“I am not, professionally, concerned about the rising age of farmers,” said Bill Brown, an agricultural economist and professor at the University of Saskatchewan.
Although he agrees that the average age of Canadian farmers is creeping up, he thinks it is due to several factors.
“Part of the problem is there’s a lot of old guys sitting in old folks homes, women too, that still fill out the census as if they were farmers,” he said.
According to Brown, 75 percent of farmers now have off-farm income and may not consider themselves farmers. Young people in particular may categorize themselves as career people rather than farmers.
“That would be fairly typical of students in my class, almost all of them are from the farm. If there’s 30 students, about five of them will be fully involved in the farm when they graduate … probably 10 will never be involved, and the other 15 will kind of be working their way into it and never actually move back home until either the parents pass on or retire, and (the students) are in their 40s.”
