Better Farming - November 2016

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Better Farming November 2016 FarmNews First > 13
AGRI-FOODJOBS
Opportunities for educated employees abound,
but are enough qualified people available?
The agri-food sector employs 2.2
million people or one in eight
Canadian workers, according
to Agriculture and Agri-Food
Canada. The sector also plays a
central role in Ontario, employing
one in nine workers in the province,
according to Statistics Canada.
Indeed, the sector accounted for 5.9
per cent of Ontario’s Gross Domestic
Product in 2015.
But a labour shortage exists in the
agri-food sector. This shortage affects
primary producers (who account for
only a small fraction of the sector),
input and service suppliers, food and
beverage processors, food retailers
and wholesalers and food service
providers.
At the national level, the labour
gap in on-farm jobs alone in 2014 was
59,000, estimates the Canadian
Agricultural Human Resource
Council (CAHRC). (Together with
the Conference Board of Canada, the
CAHRC conducted a comprehensive
survey in 2014. They interviewed
stakeholder organizations and over
800 producers across the country. The
research was released earlier this year
at the ‘Growing the AgriWorkforce
Summit’ in Winnipeg.)
Even when foreign temporary
workers were available, the on-farm
labour shortage remained critical,
said Debra Hauer, project manager at
CAHRC.
“We were able to determine that in
2014, there were 26,400 unfilled
vacancies (after accounting for
foreign temporary workers) which
cost the industry about three per cent
of farm receipts. That’s about $1.5
billion,” Hauer said.
The unfilled vacancies are not
unfilled seasonal harvest jobs. Indeed,
Hauer says horticulture producers
have less difficulty in filling harvest
jobs than other farmers have in filling
skilled, permanent jobs.
“And that’s on-farm employment
only,” she said. “We have not gone
either upstream or downstream” in
the agri-food supply chain.
Up and down the supply chain, the
labour shortage may be even more
acute. In 2011, the Ontario Agricul-
tural College (OAC) in Guelph
conducted a survey that indicated the
existence of three jobs for every
agriculture graduate.
“Anecdotally, we think those
numbers stand up and may be more
true today than they were then,” said
Rene Van Acker, the dean of OAC.
The college is re-doing the survey to
see if the results are still valid and
aims to release the results in the
spring.
Some of the shortfall can be traced
to young people shying away from the
agri-food sector. “Campaign research
(from Food and Beverage Ontario’s
Taste Your Future campaign) suggests
that there is low awareness of the size
and scope of the sector which gener-
ates $41 billion in revenue, provides
over 130,000 direct jobs and exports
$7.6 billion in product annually,” said
Fertile Ground: Growing the Competi-
tiveness of Ontario’s Agri-food Sector.
This report, released in October by
the Ontario Chamber of Commerce,
said the labour shortage threatens the
competitiveness of the agri-food
sector in Ontario and recommends
that governments take measures to
address this shortage.
“We were really shocked,” said
Kathryn Sullivan, the report’s author.
“Some of the figures are pretty
overwhelming, especially in the
primary agriculture sector.”
There is also a widespread miscon-
ception that agri-food jobs are
low-paying and don’t allow for
advancement, the report added.
But nothing could be further from
by JEFF CULP
Statistics Canada and OMAFRA, 2015