A skills crisis is threatening what should be a great future for Canadian farming.
That’s the conclusion of Royal Bank of Canada’s in-house think-tank, which has looked closely at Canadian agriculture and sees much to hope for and to worry about.
The worries and hopes are tightly connected because the crucial element that will allow Canada to realize the country’s golden agricultural potential is a highly skilled farming workforce.
“We think there’s an enormous, even historic, opportunity to Canada in agriculture, and in what we’re seeing as a fourth agricultural revolution,” Jon Stackhouse, an RBC senior vice-president, said in an interview.
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“There’s terrific economic opportunity.”
The “fourth agricultural revolution” follows previous revolutions of genetics, mass production and mechanization.
It’s what RBC thinks will be created by the tide of innovation and digitization that will make farm production much more technology-intensive and systems-based.
That revolution will demand much skills-boosting by today’s farmers and the farmers of tomorrow, the attraction of a large number of highly skilled agricultural workers, the erection of a tower of specialists and consultants, and the gradual improvement of the semi-skilled workers who are essential today but will have trouble in a highly skilled future.
Currently, there is nowhere near the depth of talent, training or organization that agriculture needs for Canada to make the most of its farming potential.
“Farmer 4.0 will need to focus on strategy and systems, leaving past tasks to a new generation of smart machines,” says the RBC report.
“To get there, we need to rethink our approach to education, both for agriculture and the growing range of sectors that affect it; do more to attract young people to farming and invest in the skills needed to attract a growing immigrant population to the sector.”
The opportunity for agriculture is great, RBC believes. If new technologies are embraced and employed fully, the ag economy could expand by $11 billion, which “would bring agricultural (gross domestic product) to $51 billion, making it bigger than automobile assembly and aeronautics combined.”
Those technologies include drone management, automated production, advanced greenhouse systems and sophisticated business management.
However, there is currently no national plan in the agriculture industry or government to meet the future need for hundreds of thousands of highly skilled farmers and agriculturalists. In fact, the country presently has a shortfall of tens of thousands of workers and will possibly be short 123,000 within a decade.
Many of today’s workers and farmers will need retraining and skill upgrades. And with thousands of farmers likely to be retiring in the 2020s, attracting new people to fill in the future gaps will be essential.
“Attracting youth to careers across food production is critical,” says the report. “The same goes for women, new Canadians and indigenous people.”
The potential RBC sees isn’t just theoretical, it argues, pointing to already highly advanced industries in the Netherlands, Israel, Australia, Norway and California as evidence. Those are the result of skilled people applying cutting edge technology on an industry scale, in everything from greenhouses to field crops to fish farms to the beef value chain.
But without a focused strategy to create and boost a skilled farming workforce, the recent stagnation seen in Canada’s farm sector could continue, and the opportunity be lost.
In recent years Canada’s agricultural productivity gains have fallen to an annual rate of less than two percent, down from the 10-year average of three percent.
“We can add even more if we follow the lead of the Netherlands or Australia to develop world-class skills and embrace a culture of innovation across the sector.”
But the time to act is now, RBC says. “The nation is at a critical moment where the agricultural workforce can be restocked with future-focused, productivity-enhancing skills.”
