The Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council’s (CAHRC) most recent survey, conducted by the Conference Board of Canada between March and September, found 28,200 jobs were unfilled during peak season in 2022.

That resulted in a 3.7 per cent decline in sales, and an estimated $3.5 billion in lost sales for on-farm agriculture businesses.

The nation-wide job vacancy rate was 5.9 per cent but agriculture reported peak vacancy of 7.4 per cent.

“Two out of every five agriculture employers could not hire all the workers they needed that year,” said a CAHRC report released Nov. 2.

“Further, a third of employers reported not receiving any applications from Canadians during the hiring season and 28 per cent received just one or two applications. These recruitment challenges resulted in lost sales, production delays, cancelled expansions, as well as excessive stress on owners and staff.”

CAHRC executive director Jennifer Wright said the survey results were expected.

“Our research prior to the pandemic did show that things were not going to get any better,” she said in an interview. “We weren’t surprised that the numbers came out the way that they did.”

The shortages aren’t just in food manufacturing or sectors downstream of primary agriculture. Wright said there has been a labour shortage in primary agriculture for some time but farmers filled the gap by working longer hours. However, it’s getting to where they can no longer do that, she said, adding that it’s not a good strategy anyway.

“Because of the labour shortages that are happening across the Canadian workforce, the commodities that may not have felt the labour shortage as severely in the past are starting to feel that shortage now,” she said.

Data shows primary agriculture employed 30 per cent more foreign workers in 2022 compared to 2017. Most of those are in crop production but most of the growth is in the poultry and egg, beef, dairy and wine sectors.

CAHRC forecasts that over the next eight years, the domestic labour gap will rise by 15 per cent from 87,700 this year to 101,100 in 2030.

“The aging population will continue to decrease the availability of Canadian workers in agriculture industries with over 85,300 retirements expected over the next eight years, equaling almost 30 per cent of the current Canadian workforce in agriculture,” the report said.

Wright said replacing aging workers will occur in competition with other industries facing the same situation.

CAHRC is leading the National Workforce Strategic Plan and the updated information will help bolster that plan. Increasing automation is expected.

Overall, the survey suggests 15,200 vacant positions in crop production by 2030 as the domestic labour gap rises. Support service industries will see a gap of 1,600, while animal production will face 4,100 vacancies.

Wright said the sector must continue to build awareness of the jobs available throughout the sector.

“Through a combination of public education, training and upskilling, improved HR management practices, targeted immigration supports and increased adoption of automation and technology, progress can be made to ensure this vital sector has the workforce needed to meet its potential,” the report said. “There is no single solution to labour market challenges facing employers in the agriculture sector.”

The release of the survey data is a precursor to a full national report and deeper dives into each province and 11 commodities, Wright said.

– Karen Briere is a reporter with The Western Producer.

The post Agriculture’s labour challenges continue appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Ensure your workers have access to information about proper protocol, such as hand washing to limit transmission. Fact sheets to post in the work environment are available here.

Ensure your workers are aware of their responsibility to properly notify you if they are feeling unwell or of any risk of exposure to COVID-19 they may have encountered.

Communicate clearly with your workers about your expectations regarding sick leave.

Remind them of your HR policies during this pandemic, specifically around sick leave. If you do not have formal policies in place, templates are available in the AgriHR Toolkit.

Depending on the existing policy, it may be required to extend sick leave beyond the current policy to ensure workers with symptoms of or exposure to COVID-19 are not stressed by a financial burden when needing to self-isolate. Such an environment where employees have this comfort will encourage self-reporting and reduce potential exposure to other employees.

Ensure that workers with symptoms of or exposure to COVID-19 are supported to self-isolate.

Do not provide information regarding the name, date of birth, or other identifiers of any workers diagnosed with the COVID-19 virus. Your workers are entitled to privacy under Canadian privacy legislation. There are special circumstances when you may have to have to share this information (e.g. life threatening reasons). Consult with legal counsel before sharing any personal medical information of your workers.

Do provide information to your workers if they have been exposed to COVID-19 in the workplace.

If known, provide:

• date(s) of their potential exposure; and
• the extent and circumstances of their potential exposure (i.e., incident indirect contact versus prolonged direct contact).

Information for your employees

Follow the recommended methods of reducing transmission of the virus, including:

• wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds, especially after using the washroom and when preparing food;
• use alcohol-based hand sanitizer if soap and water are not available;
• when coughing or sneezing:
• cough or sneeze into a tissue or the bend of your arm, not your hand;
• dispose of any tissues you have used as soon as possible in a lined waste basket;
• wash your hands afterward; and
• avoid touching your eyes, nose, or mouth with unwashed hands.
• clean the following high-touch surfaces frequently with regular household cleaners or diluted bleach (one part bleach to nine parts water): toilets, phones, electronics, door handles, tables, farm/business equipment and tools.

Managing the risk to the work environment

Limit or restrict visitors to the farm or business operation.

Implement a hand-washing regime for all employees.

Clean frequently-used surfaces with hospital-grade disinfectant.

Ensure employees are informed of the risks, symptoms, steps to self-isolate.

Consider restricting travel (business or leisure) and ask employees to self-isolate upon returning home from international travel.

Businesses that are receiving foreign workers should monitor advisories from the government departments responsible for the Temporary Foreign Worker Program.

Continue to follow recommendations provided around maintaining biosecurity and food safety standards.

Businesses that provide housing for their workers will need to ensure their risk management plan considers large numbers of employees being quarantined or requiring health care.

Ensure risk management and operational plans include pandemic plans for HR management. Having a risk management plan in place for dealing with events that may cause a crisis to the staff available to work will ensure that when/if that happens there is a structured, controlled response to it.

These type of plans should include identifying decision makers, roles and responsibilities, access to medical care, plans for both quarantine or transportation to medical facilities. They should also include communications planning such as who is the point of contact, medical contacts, internal and external communication plans, contact information for all staff, suppliers, community services.

The risk management plan should also identify what to do if staff are not available to conduct time-sensitive work (e.g. milking, strawberry picking) when not enough employees are available to do the work because of sickness. This may include having agreements with surrounding farmers for back up support.

Has there been animal-to-human infection in Canada?

There is currently no evidence to suggest that this virus is circulating in animals in Canada. It is possible that some types of animals may be able to get infected with COVID-19, but it is not yet clear whether they would show symptoms.

There are still many unknowns about COVID-19 and this is an area that remains to be studied and understood.

Until we know more, if you have been diagnosed with COVID-19 and have contact with animals:

• avoid close contact with them;
• avoid coughing and sneezing on the animals;
• have another member of your staff care for the animals;
• if this is not possible, always wash your hands before touching or feeding them; and
• limit the animal’s contact with other people and animals do not snuggle or kiss them, or let them lick you, sit on your lap, or sleep in your bed.

— Jennifer Wright is a senior HR advisor and stakeholder engagement specialist with the Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council in Ottawa. Farm employers with questions about managing workers and business are encouraged to contact CAHRC.

The post COVID-19 and farm workers: How do we manage on the farm? appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Bigger equipment to cut the time when seeding and harvesting. GPS to minimize overlap. Precision tech to make every seed and input count. No till to capture snow and retain moisture (with less erosion).

And the next generation of ag equipment may help farmers with another critical resource shortage — labour.

“In 2004, this industry was facing a labour shortage of about 30,000 workers, and in 2014, that figure had doubled to almost 60,000 workers,” said Portia MacDonald-Dewhirst, executive director of the Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council.

“What we’re seeing is this doubling of the workforce shortage every 10 years. That’s pretty concerning, given that the industry is poised for growth.”

Canada’s agricultural labour pool shrinks a little more every year, as the population ages and urban populations grow. And that’s costing the industry money.

In a 2014 impact assessment, the council concluded primary producers lost $1.5 billion in yearly revenue because of labour shortages. And that number doesn’t include losses on the processing side.

“We’re seeing staggering impacts of labour shortages already, with the expectation that, that is going to increase significantly,” said MacDonald-Dewhirst. “Employers, business owners, and farmers are choosing to retire early or scale down their operations or get out of the business altogether.”

If things don’t turn around soon, Canada’s ag industry can expect to face a labour shortage of 114,000 people by 2025, the council predicts.

“How is this industry ever going to achieve growth targets when even just sustaining the industry is a challenge, given the labour shortages that continue to plague the industry?”

New technology

But it’s not all bad news, she added. Even as labour has got tighter and tighter, each worker’s productivity has shot up dramatically.

“Across a five-year span, there was a 45 per cent increase in productivity per worker as an average across all commodities. That is unheard of in other industries,” said MacDonald-Dewhirst.

“Partly that has to do with technology — one person being able to do more because they’re being aided by some technology changes.”

That’s been a key trend in equipment manufacturing over the past 15 years, said Leah Olson, chief executive officer at SeedMaster Manufacturing and its sister company, DOT Technology Corp. The latter is now in the early commercialization of an autonomous “power platform,” on which a seeder, sprayer, or other implement can be mounted and operated by a tablet.

The inspiration was self-driving car technology but inventor Norbert Beaujot has cited labour savings as one of the big pluses of autonomous farm equipment.

“There are pretty big technological changes that have occurred in the industry,” said Olson. “Most of these changes are the result of necessity. When you look at most innovation, it comes at a time when people are looking for a better way to do things or they have to do something better by virtue of the situation they find themselves in.”

Equipment manufacturers are working on new technologies that will reduce — or eliminate entirely — the need for skilled labour.

“Right now, farmers are looking for solutions to their farm labour challenges,” said Olson. “As the labour shortage gets even more acute, I suspect another change is going to occur to address that.”

That change is already in the works, as DOT isn’t the only manufacturer exploring the next frontier of autonomous machinery.

“We believe strongly in autonomous farming, so when I look ahead at the next 15 years, I’m very excited about the future of farming,” said Olson.

Her company’s plan is to marry self-driving tech with artificial intelligence — a.k.a. machine learning.

“In year one, our power platform may not reduce labour, simply because we need to continue to develop the machine learning on the DOT platform,” said Olson. “But the intent is to be able to reduce the overall labour on farms by using autonomous equipment and machine learning.”

‘Tractobots’

It’s not just major equipment manufacturers — some farmers are going the DIY route to advance this technology.

“Even when I was a kid out discing or out drilling, I thought, ‘There’s got to be a better way,’” Indiana farmer Kyler Laird told attendees at last year’s FarmTech.

“I spent all this money on RTK (real-time kinematic) guidance, but I thought I could do better.”

So he did. In 2015, Laird — who worked as a computer scientist before coming back to the farm in 2010 — automated his grandfather’s Massey tractor using less than $1,000 in parts and some simple computer programming.

That’s when things got really interesting.

He sent the tractor out to plant 50 acres of corn in the field across from his house using the simplest algorithms he could come up with. And it worked. His first ‘tractobot’ was up and running.

But the family farmer won’t become obsolete any time soon, Laird predicted.

“A lot of people think, ‘Great, I can go on vacation and check in from the beach,’” he said. “I think of it as, I can do all the things that it takes a human to do instead of trying to be a robot and stay on the line.”

So instead of relaxing on the couch while his tractor does the work, Laird is out in the field, checking on seeding depth or running to get fertilizer — the things he can’t do from the cab of a tractor.

“I’ve been in the cab, and I planted very poorly,” he said. “If you want to know if you’re planting well, you need to get on the ground.”

For Laird, who has also done some automation on his grain cart and combine, autonomous equipment eliminates the tedious parts of farming.

“I could only spend a few hours in a tractor before getting pretty fatigued. With this auto steer, I could go all day and all night,” he said. “What a huge difference.”

By supervising the operation from a truck or in the field, Laird can focus on the business of farming while reducing the work of farming.

“I’m in the truck answering calls or emails, and I look up and it’s done another 10 acres,” he said, noting he seeded all of his corn acres the previous year “without being on the tractor while it was planting.”

Not a cure-all

Still, autonomous machines won’t be a silver bullet for ag’s labour woes, MacDonald-Dewhirst cautioned.

“Although it’s helpful, it’s not going to solve the labour challenges moving forward,” she said.

The introduction of new technology doesn’t eliminate the need for skilled labour — it just changes the skills that are needed.

“It’s a double-edged sword. You have to then train the workforce, you have to adapt to those new production techniques and technology, and in order to maintain those systems, you need different skills moving forward,” she said.

“It’s definitely a good thing. It will address some of those labour challenges. But it won’t make them go away completely.”

Instead, the industry will need to address knowledge and skill gaps in existing workers, while also increasing the supply of new ones by improving access to foreign workers and encouraging more Canadians to think about careers in the ag industry.

And MacDonald-Dewhirst thinks it can be done without automated tractors.

“This is an industry that’s really effective at figuring things out and addressing challenges when they come up,” she said. “It’s an industry that’s good at putting out those fires.”

But as far as Olson is concerned, autonomous equipment is the future of farming.

“We’re just the tip of the iceberg with DOT,” she said. “I believe it will change how farmers farm — either by allowing them to farm in ways that they couldn’t, or by allowing them to make different decisions that will help them be more efficient and profitable.

“Autonomous equipment is a real opportunity for all of us in the agricultural community.”

The post Ag tech tackles the next frontier — the people shortage on farms appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Unfortunately, this is brutally reflective of boardroom reality — and supported by realms of reports and books on the challenges of being a woman in the boardroom or employed on a team. There was an assumption that this did not happen to men. And then I recalled a recent situation with my vehicle.

Being a farm girl I know my vehicle inside and out, and can fix a host of things. Taking it to a garage for a B.C. inspection though taught me that the guys would try anything — at least once. From the $500 rear door repair (I cleaned and oiled it for a total cost of $1.50) to the $120 to clean the ‘completely wrecked’ light covers ($3.99 for VIM and a little elbow grease) to the $3,500 to replace the shocks, boots, and brakes (nice try), I was bombarded with an assumption of my ignorance. When I mentioned this experience from a female perspective to my male friends they replied, “It is not just you, this happens to us, too!”

• More with Brenda Schoepp: Communities are strong when their citizens are empowered

What also happens to men is that they can be unheard in the boardroom, and victims of the theft of their ideas from CEOs, chairs, and other leaders. I came across some new research published in the Globe and Mail, revealing that when it came to the boardroom and the team, leaders ignored or stole ideas. Women and men expressed their frustration, with 47 per cent saying that leaders (CEOs or chairs) stole ideas and called them their own, and 63 per cent said they were not recognized for their achievements.

I recall this happening to me specifically on two boards, one national and one provincial. On the one board, my ideas were simply not acknowledged as though I had not spoken at all, even though they were well researched and presented. The chair or one of his closest buddies would then suggest the same thing, word for word, garner support, and the resolution would be presented.

On the other board, the chair would very politely meet with me ahead of time to ‘get a feel for what was happening and my vision on things.’ Then at the meeting, he would repeat them word for word as his own even if the suggested topic was entirely out of his field of expertise.

I always felt that speaking up would be petty. After all, it did not matter how the team got there — as long as we did. However, preserving the dignity of employees and board members is critical for the function of the organization, and it is the right thing to do. I appreciate how frustrated board members and employees must feel when their ideas are either ignored or stolen.

If you are invited to the table, your voice has a right to be heard.

Ignoring the voice of a man or woman does not build a culture of respect. And culture is that reflection of values and beliefs that nurtures behaviour, mindfulness, and social patterns. A great culture in a business or organization helps with adaptability and to mitigate risk. It is a collaborative effort that urges, empowers, and engages the voices at the table — and then gives them credit for doing so.

Leaders need to tune into what is being said, thank the person for it, and get permission to use the idea moving forward. Responses such as, ‘That is a great idea Tim. May I present it at our next executive meeting?’ will do. In the case of proprietary or visionary information, the response could be, “Thank you Linda, I would like to give you a few minutes on the agenda to introduce that. It ties in well with our overall goal… ”

Because people like to ‘fit in,’ a good measurement of employees not being heard is turnover. If you can’t keep staff, they are likely feeling robbed of their time and intelligence. If the board you sit on keeps defaulting to the status quo and to those ideas proposed by an inner circle, it is unlikely that your being there will change the culture. And when that person in the position of power steals your ideas, it’s not OK to let them mine your mind.

Being bold is taking ownership.

For women and men who have put so much care and thought into a problem or a vision, it is quite OK to say, ‘Thank you for acknowledging our conversation earlier. For the sake of the others in the room, I will just take a moment to expand on this and give you some background on how I got to this idea/decision.’

And finally, choose well.

Interview and investigate the board or company that is of interest or interested in you. You deserve to be empowered in a culture of both curiosity and respect.

The post Don’t get thrown overboard, take ownership appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Workers were walking away from the job. The people who stayed weren’t happy. And Serfas found himself on Facebook, “begging people to come run a tractor.”

Finally, he went to one of his remaining workers and said something that would change his farming operation: “I’m no good at this.”

“You’re a farmer, but you’re not only managing the crops that you grow or the agronomy or the marketing,” the Turin-area farmer said at FarmTech last month. “You’re also a manager of people. I don’t think there are many people in ag who went to school to work in human resources. You just don’t think of things like that.”

That’s true on most Canadian farms.

Only 18 per cent of farmers have a formal human resources plan — making it the weakest area of business management on their farm, according to a 2015 survey conducted by the Agri-Food Management Institute and Farm Management Canada.

“When it comes to the everyday things on the farm — production decisions, agronomy decisions — we’re fairly good,” said Heather Watson, executive director of Farm Management Canada.

“But when it comes to business and human resource planning, taking time to assess, and using outside help, we could use some improvement.”

The survey identified seven business practices that separate the most profitable 25 per cent of farmers from the bottom 25 per cent. The seven were lifelong learning; making business decisions based on accurate financial reports; working with professional farm business advisers; using formal business planning; knowing your cost of production; assessing and managing risks; and having a solid financial plan.

“This is your recipe for success. These are things that the top performers are doing that the bottom farmers aren’t doing,” Watson told FarmTech attendees.

“It’s the difference between $10,000 return on assets and $100,000 return on assets.”

While HR management didn’t make the top seven, it should, said both Serfas and the other farmer on the FarmTech panel.

“I’m no good at HR either. It just wasn’t a skill passed down from the old man. But it is becoming more and more important,” said Sterling Hilton, who farms with his family near Strathmore.

“Your most valuable asset isn’t the combine you have in the shed. It’s the people you have working with you.”

Times have changed

Some of this shift toward worker-focused farming is being spurred by the up-and-coming generation, said Hilton.

“What I see on the farm today is an opportunity in agriculture that’s unprecedented — the amount of young people who are coming back to the farm with post-secondary education,” he said. “That’s a huge opportunity.”

Increasingly, these young people have training in things such as human resources, finance, and business management.

“It’s so important to recognize the skill set that you have around your farm management table and put the right people in the right seats,” said Hilton. “That’s what is going to accelerate your business to the next level.”

It was a different story 20 years ago when Serfas was graduating from high school. His family was then farming 2,000 acres and had two employees. Going to college wasn’t part of the game plan.

“Human resources was the furthest thing from my mind,” he said. “You paid a guy $7 an hour to do the work, and at the end of the day, he went home.

“A lot has changed in 20 years, and we’ve had to change and adapt as we’ve gone along.”

Today, Serfas farms around 56,000 acres and has a mix of around 40 seasonal, part-time, and full-time employees for his grain operation and 6,000-head feedlot. And he still wishes he had gone to college.

“Unless you go back to school, it’s tough to find a lot of the skills that you need to succeed in this modern era of farming,” he said. “A lot of what I did was learning on the go.”

And one of the biggest things he learned is that you have to accept “there are certain things you’re good at and certain things you’re not good at.”

A big part of that is trusting your workers, added Hilton. And quite often, that’s the hardest part of human resource management.

“It used to be top-down management, but moving forward, it’s going to be a more collaborative approach — trying to get ideas from everyone to move forward in a positive direction,” he said.

“If you’re not going to give people some autonomy over what they do, good luck keeping them around.”

The post You need to up your game on managing people, say producers appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

The workshops will focus on key components of an HR strategy: simple effective job descriptions, interviewing, training plans, boosting employee engagement, and tools for managing performance.

The workshops run from 9 a.m. until 4 p.m. and cost $25 (which includes lunch). To register call 1-800-387-6030.

The post Learn how to become a better boss appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

While most producers think about their farm in terms of their livestock and crops, they neglect to think about the people, says a rural business specialist with Alberta Agriculture and Forestry.

But that needs to change, Abby Verstraete told attendees at the recent Grazing School for Women.

“Human resources will become a bigger issue in farming as farms get bigger and employment becomes more of an issue,” she said. “People don’t look at human resources as something they can manage and save costs on, but you really can see direct returns if you spend time in that area.”

Start by thinking about the long-term goals for your operation, she said.

“Think about the bigger picture and how human resources will fit into your farm’s strategic plan and your business planning. It should also fit with your philosophy and your goals.”

Then define the roles and responsibilities for everyone on the farm, whether they are employees or family.

“I would emphasize that it’s just as important to have good management practices with family because you are less likely to communicate well with them,” said Verstraete. “You are more likely to make assumptions that they will know what you are talking about, and assumptions that they know what roles or responsibilities you want them to take.”

Miscommunication comes with a big cost if it results in stressed animals, broken equipment, or lost productivity. It’s key to have clearly defined expectations for every worker and clear lines of authority, she said.

Employers should also continually assess their labour needs and see how those needs line up with their current work force.

“If they don’t match, sometimes it’s as easy as looking at job descriptions and moving around responsibilities with people who are on the farm,” said Verstraete.

Job descriptions pinpoint responsibilities and determine what each team member has to do.

“These are also good for succession. People can see who is doing what, and it’s formal and written down.”

Compensation is tricky and Verstraete’s advice was to talk to other employers, look at job postings to see what employers in your area are offering, and use online resources. (One she recommended was the agri-talent section of the Canadian Agricultural Human Resources Council website — which lists agricultural jobs across the country.)

When writing a job description, make sure it’s accurate.

“It’s an agreement on both sides,” she said. “They want to know what they’re stepping into and you want to know that they can handle it.”

Consider offering benefits, as well as things such as specialized training or mentorship, to make yourself a more attractive employer.

“Often people working in the agriculture industry are looking beyond compensation, and are looking for training or mentorship,” said Verstraete. “This is what keeps them engaged and passionate. They’re going to keep learning in the industry and be able to develop. It’s a human need to feel that you are continually growing.”

Communication is the key, she added.

“People should know what is expected of them at work. This sounds like the easiest thing ever, but it can be very complex and can get confusing.”

Additional HR online resources

Farm Management Canada has articles, books, and other tools at fmc-gac.com.

Manitoba’s Agriculture Department has a free online publication called Human Resource Management for Agriculture Organizations that can be found at the Manitoba Agriculture website (search for “human resource management”).

The post Humans — your most important farm resource appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.

Despite “endless” domestic recruitment and a seven per cent unemployment rate in Canada, the country’s meat industry is still short about 1,000 workers.

And the situation “just gets worse and worse,” an official with the Canadian Meat Council told attendees at the recent Ag Labour Summit.

“We’re not going to be able to sustain long term a competitive meat industry if we can’t have workers to fill our plants or on our farms where livestock is being produced,” said Ron Davidson, the council’s director of international trade, government, and media relations.

“We’ve got two new trade deals out there, which hopefully will open substantial new markets. But we don’t have the workers to take advantage of that.”

Liberal Party of Canada president Anna Gainey sent a letter to the council prior to the election promising to “fix the program.”

“We need accurate labour market data, clear rules, strong enforcement, and a credible pathway to citizenship for foreign workers,” Gainey stated in the letter.

But it’s not just the program that’s an issue, but also the public’s perception of it, said Davidson.

“After three decades in Ottawa — mostly inside government — I know that taking something like that and turning it into a program that they can sell is a challenge,” said the former senior civil servant with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and other federal departments.

“We have to tell them what we want and we have to give them the information to justify it.”

There’s “a solid 80 per cent public animosity” towards the temporary foreign worker program, and Canadians are skeptical about whether it’s really needed, he said.

“We continue to be told, ‘If you recruit harder and pay more, you’re going to get all the workers you want,’” said Davidson. “People have a hard time understanding how you can have a worker shortage if there’s all these unemployed Canadians out there.

“We know there are many unemployed Canadians. The problem is trying to recruit them.”

• More on the Alberta Farmer: Foreign worker program a paperwork jungle

And recent changes to the program — including hiring caps of 20 per cent of a company’s workforce (which will drop to 10 per cent next year), increased fees, and decreased work terms — have made it harder to hire temporary foreign workers.

“We still do not have a pathway that’s working as well as we need it to, to get workers into the industry,” said Davidson. “We took a program that wasn’t designed for full-time openings and started using it. We’re caught in this program, and we’re certainly feeling the impact.”

And while meat packers and processors are on the front line of this battle, livestock producers are paying a price, too, he said.

“I don’t care if you’re a producer, a processor, a worker, or a consumer — everyone loses under the current program when you have empty workstations in the plants,” said Davidson. “It doesn’t matter where you are in the value chain. If you’ve got a link in that chain that’s not functioning properly, we’re all hurting.”

One example is offal. There are strong markets, particularly in Asia, for liver, tongue, tripe and other organ meats but the worker shortage means plants aren’t able to collect offal.

“Instead of going into South Korea or China as exports with value in them, they were going into rendering. That is not a winning formula for a sustainable industry,” he said. “We’re supposed to be doing value added and product innovation, and this reduces those. We want investment in Canada, and this reduces investment in Canada and quite frankly transfers it overseas.”

That makes it critical for the meat industry to convince both the new government and the Canadian public that it is “hiring everybody we can domestically.”

“We just have to work with them to make it palatable and explain it to the media and the public.”

The post A Liberal ‘fix’ for temporary foreign worker program may be elusive appeared first on Alberta Farmer Express.