DECEMBER 2023 25 DEEPENING THE LABOUR POOL The Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council (CAHRC) has released an executive report entitled Sowing Seeds of Change. It’s an agricultural labour market forecast up until 2030. It’s not quite mysticism, but rather a scientific examination of trends based on the responses to its many Canadian ag surveys. The first thing we need to do, is to acknowledge that Canada’s agricultural sector is suffering from a labour shortage. Based on data from the Conference Board of Canada and its Model of Occupations, Skills, and Technology (MOST), over 28,000 agriculture jobs were left unfilled during the peak season in 2022. In this case, the ag sector includes crop production, animal production, support services, and agricultural wholesale industries. What it does mean is that those few people have been asked to work harder (or even more efficiently) to get the jobs done. Were all aspects of the agriculture sector successful? No. According to the CAHRC, “labour shortages caused a 3.7 percent decline in sales in 2022, which, when applied to total sales in agriculture, resulted in an estimated $3.5 billion in lost sales.” This number was based on CAHRC’s Employer Survey 2023, with the total sales in agriculture coming from cash receipts per Statistics Canada. We should point out that it does not include lost sales by support services or wholesale industries. In other words, the losses in Canadian agriculture are worse than the numbers above. In 2022, the CAHRC surveys pinned our ag labour at 351,000 Canadian workers and 71,000 temporary What’s new in the Canadian ag labour market? A look at the country’s labour forecast through 2030. By Andrew Joseph, Editor Milking a cow nowadays is a technical, automated, daily job that workers must be properly trained to operate. deimagine/E+ photo
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