Moving forward the agriculture sector will continue to face one major issue, and that is finding quality employees.
Overall, the sector, especially at the primary production level, is becoming less important in terms of overall national economy. That tends to limit young people looking in that direction for careers.
And on the farm producers require workers with training. The common tractor or combine is an electronic marvel these days, with a myriad of computer controlled elements and high tech gauges. That means an operator needs a set of skills that far exceed what the same position required even a decade ago.
It is not a case of a lack of jobs, so much as employees fitting specific needs.
At one level are high tech jobs and the other labourers, and both have challenges to fill.
A recent release from the Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council (CAHRC) touched on the labourer situation. The release suggested the impact of labour shortages on the beef and pork industries have become increasingly critical in recent years.
“New research indicates that the trend will worsen between now and 2025, resulting in a widening labour gap that threatens to limit the profitability and growth of Canada’s red-meat industry,” it noted.
The CAHRC has completed a three-year study of the Canadian red-meat industry and released a labour market forecast to 2025 for the beef and pork industries. It is an examination of the workplace trends and realities that will shape these industries between now and 2025. The red-meat industry includes finished cattle and swine, as well as feedlots.
The study is part of the Labour Market Information (LMI) initiative, which examined the labour market in Canada’s agriculture sector across 11 commodity areas.
“The study revealed that in 2014, the beef industry workforce consisted of 40,900 people and was unable to fill 3,500 jobs due to a lack of domestic workers. The pork industry, which employed 14,000 people that year, was unable to fill 800 jobs. By 2025, these industries are expected to see the labour gap widen significantly, with as many as 15,500 more jobs than the domestic workforce can fill,” notes the release.
The federal government has reacted at least in part to the situation, having recently announced changes to the four-year cumulative duration rule which will no longer apply to temporary foreign workers in Canada, effective immediately. An exemption is also being made on the cap for seasonal industries seeking temporary foreign workers for up to 180 days during the 2017 calendar year to be extended until December 31. More changes for immigration and the TFWP are expected this year.
“The changes the federal government announced... is good news for agricultural employers and farm and food workers,” explains Portia MacDonald-Dewhirst, executive director of CAHRC, in a second release. “The feedback we received from agricultural stakeholders is very supportive of these changes.”
“Our recently released national Labour Market Information (LMI) research was conducted over a three-year period with extensive collaboration with industry where we spoke to over 1,000 agricultural employers and employees,” says MacDonald-Dewhirst. “The feedback we received shows there is a critical gap between the demand for workers and the supply of available workers. This gap has doubled in the last 10 years to approximately 60,000 workers.
“By 2025, the labour gap is expected to grow to 114,000 workers. The LMI research also revealed that primary agriculture has the highest industry job vacancy rate at seven per cent. This is resulting in $1.5 billion in lost sales.”
Those numbers are certainly worrying as we move forward.
Immigrant workers will fill many of the labour-level positions, but work will also need to go into attracting young people to acquire the specific training needed for the higher tech careers the sector is evolving to require.
