Study seeks answers on agriculture workers

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

by SUSAN MANN

Gaining a better understanding of where people come from to work in agriculture is one of the focuses of a nation-wide study on farm labour.

The Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council is conducting the study in conjunction with the Conference Board of Canada.

Results will be released as a report in the fall or next winter, says Debra Hauer, Council project manager.

The report will update previous Council study results published in 2009 and 2011. Those studies looked at demand by asking farmers how many people they hired.

“This time around we added the supply component and looked at where people are coming from to work in the agricultural industry,” Hauer notes.

“When we’re talking about supply we’re talking about the people who are working in the workforce right now and where people might come from in the future,” to work in agriculture, she adds.

Hauer says the first phase of the current study was a large-scale survey of farmers, workers and organizations. It took place from November 2014 to the beginning of this month. The groups aimed to obtain 800 completed responses and actually received 953, she notes.

“We’re pleased at the very strong response that we have,” Hauer says.

As well, the Conference Board has almost completed another phase that has involved interviews with 80 agricultural people who are knowledgeable about the sector and its labour requirements.

The Council is now coordinating six farmer focus groups across the country to comment on the information gathered.

The idea of the focus groups is “to make sure that the information (from the survey and interviews) is correct and reflects people’s views,” Hauer says.

The first focus group meeting took place earlier this week in British Columbia.

The Ontario meeting will be held Feb. 27 in Ottawa. Other meetings are being held in March in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec and New Brunswick.

Hauer says the Council is planning to have 20 to 25 farmers attend each meeting.

Elgin County farmer Mark Wales, Council chair, says based on the previous labour market information studies “we know there’s an ongoing shortage of about 35,000 positions in agriculture across the country.” The farm labour shortages affect all skill levels and all sectors.

Wales, the past president of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, says the food processing and meatpacking sectors are particularly hard hit by labour shortages. Those two sectors’ labour difficulties are “accentuated because they depend heavily on the Temporary Foreign Worker program.”

That program, administered by the federal government, helps employers contact workers from other countries when they cannot find qualified Canadians. The federal government announced last year it is reforming the program.

Wales says the sectors “already had a farm-labour problem and the government’s tinkering and the changes they’re attempting to make on the fly to the Foreign Worker Program is not helping.”  

Regionally, farmers in the Prairies have difficulty competing with the oil industry for workers. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a dairy farmer in Alberta or a grain farmer, the oil patch is that giant sucking sound taking young people away,” he says.

In Ontario, the farm labour picture isn’t as bad as the Prairies but “we still have people who from season to season can’t get enough people to pick strawberries or fruit,” Wales says. “It’s not everyone every year, but it’s a problem.” Agricultural employers “just can’t get the labour when they want it.”

Ontario farmers can make use of the Seasonal Agricultural Worker program but there’s a process they must go through to qualify and it’s not available for every commodity, he says. The program enables farmers to use seasonal workers from Mexico and the Caribbean for a maximum of eight months in the year if they can’t find Canadian workers to fill their jobs.  

Wales says Ontario farmers use the program the most and that’s been the case for the 49 years the program has been available to them.

Part of the difficulty in finding farm workers is “the seasonal nature of what we do,” Wales explains. “You have really busy periods and then you have periods” when extra workers aren’t required.

Another feature of the farm labour picture is as the industry gets more technical “we need more trained employees,” he says.

The Council is an industry umbrella organization that addresses human resources issues in agriculture. The Conference Board of Canada is an independent, non-profit applied research organization. BF