The gap between labour demand and the domestic workforce in agriculture has doubled from 30,000 to 59,000 in the past 10 years and projections indicate that by 2025, the Canadian agri-workforce could be short workers for 114,000 jobs. This is a key finding of the newly released Agriculture 2025: How the Sector's Labour Challenges Will Shape its Future research by the Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council (CAHRC). The LMI research also revealed that primary agriculture has the highest industry job vacancy rate at seven per cent.

 

The agriculture industry has been encouraging young people and workers from other sectors to get into agriculture as a career. Despite extensive efforts, gaps still exist and there still will be a large void in the future.

 

The research indicates that the worker shortage is critical today and will be even more so 10 years from now, with potentially serious consequences for business viability, industry sustainability and future growth.  Access to less labour for Canadian farmers now and into the future will affect food security for Canadian consumers and will also affect export potential of Canada's entire agri-food industry.

 

To address the labour issues identified in the research, CAHRC, with the help of the Government of Canada, has developed agriculture-specific human resource (HR) tools designed to support modern farm operations to manage their workforce. CAHRC offers Agri Skills, online and in-person training programs, and the Agri HR Toolkit - an online resource guide and templates to address the HR needs of any business. For agricultural organizations there are customized labour issues briefings that apply the new research to specific commodities and provinces, to explore the labour implications within their specific area. For more information on these and other CAHRC offerings visit www.cahrc-ccrha.ca.