“Our farmers are being hurt badly and we’re going to have to do something about that… We’re going to have an order on that pretty soon, I think,” Trump said at a White House event, adding that the order would address the hotels sector, too.

He did not say what changes the order would implement or when it would take effect. Representatives for the White House and Department of Homeland Security had no specific comment about the order, while representatives at the Department of Agriculture could not be immediately reached.

“We will follow the president’s direction and continue to work to get the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens off of America’s streets,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said.

Reliance on immigration

U.S. farm industry groups have long wanted Trump to spare their sector from mass deportations, which could upend a food supply chain dependent on immigrants.

Nearly half of the nation’s approximately 2 million farm workers and many dairy and meatpacking workers lack legal status, according to the departments of Labor and Agriculture.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told CNBC that Trump was reviewing all possible steps but that Congress would have to act.

Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, a leading farm lobby, said on Thursday that farm workers were key to the nation’s food supply.

“If these workers are not present in fields and barns, there is a risk of supply-chain disruptions similar to those experienced during the pandemic,” Duvall said in a statement.

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in labor shortages and supply-chain snarls, with meat plants forced to idle and dairy farms to dump milk, and consumers encountering emptier shelves at grocery stores.

Trump acknowledges impacts

In recent days, demonstrations have been taking place in major U.S. cities to protest immigration raids.

Trump is carrying out his campaign promise to deport immigrants in the country illegally. But protesters and some Trump supporters have questioned the targeting of those who are not convicted criminals, including in places of employment such as those that sparked last week’s protests in Los Angeles.

On Thursday, Trump acknowledged the impact of the crackdown on sectors such as the hotel industry, which includes his company. The Trump Organization has said Trump’s adult sons are running his business.

“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” he wrote on his social media platform. “Changes are coming!”

Farmers have a legal option for hiring temporary or seasonal labor with the H-2A visa program, which allows employers to bring in seasonal workers if they can show there are not enough U.S. workers willing, qualified and available to do the job.

Rollins said Trump was “looking at every potential tool in the toolkit” and pointed to the length of the temporary H-2A visas.

The president understands that we can’t feed our nation or the world without that labor force, and he’s listening to the farmers on that,” she told CNBC.

—Reporting by Jeff Mason, Susan Heavey and P.J. Huffstutter; additional reporting by Bhargav Acharya, Aatreyee Dasgupta, Leah Douglas and Ted Hesson.

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That has Lupe Gonzalo worried.

“A lot of places in the field, you don’t have access to shade, to clean and fresh drinking water,” said Gonzalo, a senior staff member with the non-profit Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), who works with farmworkers across several southern states.

For years Gonzalo picked tomatoes, berries, sweet potatoes and other produce, and the heat was always an issue. But her concerns are mounting.

“It’s getting hotter and hotter as climate change continues, and it will continue to be an issue for workers,” Gonzalo, 43, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“We’ve already seen far too many people become ill and even lose their lives. So this is truly an urgent issue,” she said.

While regulations to protect agricultural workers from the heat have been held up by political wrangling, Gonzalo and her colleagues have spearheaded an alternate strategy.

They seek to sidestep the slow and increasingly politicized government machinery and instead appeal directly to consumers and large brands.

Gonzalo and others in the CIW set up the Fair Food Program to strike deals directly with large companies.

The companies pledge to pay fair wages, eliminate sexual harassment and other issues – including increasingly stringent heat protections – in return for Fair Food Program certification for their products.

The heat-related measures include providing shade, having required breaks, training for workers and supervisors, electrolyte-infused water, and the ability to seek care without fear of retaliation.

‘Sourced for good’

The program currently covers tens of thousands of workers in 10 states, through agreements with companies such as Walmart, McDonald’s, Subway and others.

The group also works with farmworkers in Chile and South Africa, and is seeking to expand to other countries.

At national grocery store Whole Foods, for instance, consumers can purchase Fair Food Program-certified sweet potatoes and cut flowers labelled as “Sourced for Good”.

Now the program’s reach is about to expand significantly, after the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) highlighted its approach for special acknowledgement under a new program aimed at addressing human rights and worker retention on farms.

Last month, the first-ever pilot awards were made under the program, which the Fair Food Program said would see it expand to 13 new states, nearly doubling the number of farms covered.

Tomato grower Jon Esformes, whose company received one of the awards, has implemented the Fair Food Program guidelines on his operations across the United States and Mexico, though the CIW is not present in the latter country.

He said he took the steps after sitting down for the first time to simply talk with CIW leaders about their concerns.

“I found very quickly a group of people that were interested in the same things I was interested in,” he said. “We want to provide a safe and fair workplace, we want to have transparency, we need our workers to feel like it is their farm.”

Protection decades overdue

The U.S. government has dragged its feet on worker heat protections for decades, said Juanita Constible, a senior advocate with the heat solutions program at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

About 51 million U.S. workers are at high risk to heat, with less than a fifth of those covered by standards, the think tank has found.

The federal government is only now updating 1970s rules, last week releasing a proposal that would offer heat protections for indoor and outdoor workers, including requiring employers to provide workers with water and shaded or air-conditioned areas above certain temperatures.

Still, a final rule could take years, with recent moves by the Supreme Court potentially further threatening such efforts.

While business associations said they were still reviewing the new proposal, farming and construction lobby groups have criticized early steps in the new process, warning of burdens to businesses.

Yet, Constible said, “the research has kept piling up that heat is not only potentially deadly to workers, but also drastically affects their productivity – billions of work hours lost in the U.S. and around the world because it’s too darn hot.”

The probability of work-related accidents rises by nearly six per cent when temperatures pass 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius), according to research from the Workers Compensation Research Institute published in May.

In the absence of federal action, five states have passed their own laws with a sixth on the horizon, though these vary significantly in scope.

Cities have also taken proactive steps, including in June in Tucson, Arizona, but such efforts have run into political resistance, with new local rules in Florida and Texas halted by state officials.

Constible worries such politicization could continue, which she says underscores the importance of the Fair Food Program’s strategy of appealing to brands and consumers.

“I’m a huge fan. I think it’s been amazingly significant for those workers,” she said.

Farms that can ensure workers feel safe and have access to the tools to keep them healthy have found it easier to entice prospective workers, a UDSA spokesperson said.

That is what Esformes, the CEO of Pacific Tomato Growers, has found amid recent worker shortages.

“When the rest of North America was reeling with lack of workers, we did not have enough jobs for the people who wanted to work for us. And the reason is we’ve created a workplace-of-choice environment,” said Esformes, 61.

He said May saw the hottest temperatures ever recorded in parts of Florida, just as farms were in full harvest, but that Fair Food Program heat guidelines were in operation for the nearly 3,500 workers on the company’s 15,000 acres (6,070 hectares).

“There’s definitely a cost associated with it. Electrolyte powder is not cheap; breaks aren’t cheap,” Esformes said. “But you know what also is not cheap? People getting sick and people feeling like they’re not safe.”

—The Thomson Reuters Foundation is the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters. 

—Updated July 9. Clarifies that CIW is not present in Mexico.

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“While government is reviewing its TFW program, it needs to consider the practical needs of agri-businesses and the future of Canada’s food security,” said Juliette Nicolaÿ, CFIB’s policy analyst in a release. “Farmers are already struggling with chronic staffing shortages and when they turn to foreign labour, it’s only as a last resort because they can’t find anyone locally. That’s concerning given Canada’s ageing population and a perceived lack of interest among Canadian workers in a career in agriculture.”

The prevalence of TFWs has grown since the program was launched in the 1970s, with an estimated three in 10 agricultural businesses hiring TFWs in 2023. The reliance on foreign workers is even more pronounced in certain regions, such as Quebec (51 per cent), and sub-sectors characterized by labor intensive tasks, such as the fruits, vegetable and horticultural specialties (64 per cent), according to CFIB.

According to Employment and Social Development Canada, among employers who hired TFWs, 92 per cent said foreign workers helped them meet demand for their products or services, while 89 per cent said that TFWs helped them stay in business.

Most agri-businesses (59 per cent) say they would be in favour of a multi-employer work permit as an option, to enable employers to share a foreign worker. However, the majority don’t support sectoral and/or regional work permits whether it’s under the current (59 per cent) or a new program structure where a third party would recruit and dispatch a pool of foreign workers (50 per cent), as they fear such permits could facilitate employee poaching and hinder retention.

To improve the TFW program’s efficiency, CFIB recommends the federal government consider:

• Reducing red tape associated with hiring TFWs, notably streamlining the Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) process
• Allowing for the sharing or transferring foreign workers as an option (e.g., multi-employer work permit)
• Indexing the housing deduction to inflation – it is currently C$30, which does not reflect real housing prices
• Allowing employers to match the wages offered by another employer with an LMIA in the same area to strengthen retention and curtail poaching. Provisions under the Employer Compliance Regime currently limit this.
• Reimbursing the employer for the costs associated with the administration and enforcement of the compliance inspection, should the LMIA not be issued
• Introducing a mechanism to compensate initial costs covered by the employer whose employee has been poached and streamlining access to new TFWs

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“While some agriculture employers offered these benefits, many participating organizations do not offer any flexible work arrangements or basic benefits like sick days,” CAHRC wrote in a report on its 2024 survey of compensation practices in Canadian agriculture.

The survey encompassed 140 organizations representing 609 employees across major farming sectors (horticulture, beef and poultry are not reported).

It found that on average of 44 per cent of farms offer their employees sick time. Hog farms are most likely to give sick leave (56 per cent) but give the fewest days (3.75 days average) while apiculture (beekeeping) was least likely to offer sick time (21 per cent), but those who did on average allowed employees six sick days per year.

The majority of grain and oilseed (between 60 and 70 per cent), dairy (about 60 per cent) and swine farms (nearly 90 per cent) offered employees vacation time. Those that gave workers between 11 and 13 days off.

Finfish (aquaculture) farms were most likely to offer employees health insurance (a bit more than 80 per cent of farms). Swine farms came next, with nearly 70 per cent reporting health insurance. Around 30 per cent of dairy farms offered health insurance, while about 60 per cent of grain and oilseed farms did so.

The survey also examined employee wages by role.

Grain and oilseed farms consistently paid employees the most. The weighted average wage for farm managers was nearly $38 with a median wage of$39.90. Farm workers were on average paid a bit more than $27 per hour, with a median wage of $28.

Farm managers on dairy farms on average made nearly $26/hr with a median wage of $26, and workers made $21/hr and a median wage of $20/hr.

Hog farms paid managers on average a bit less than $32/hr and workers about $21/hr.

By comparison, employees in the construction sector in 2023 were paid nearly $36/hr on average, across all roles, Statistics Canada data shows. Manufacturing paid an average of $33.50/hr. Transportation and warehousing paid nearly $33/hr. Accommodation and food services paid on average a bit less than $22/hr across all positions.

StatCan data puts the average agriculture sector wage at $24.77 per hour in 2023.

The Canadian job market is expected to slow in 2024 with increasing unemployment rates from labour availability, CAHRC said in the report. However, agriculture is experiencing persistent labour shortages as producers struggle to hire workers.

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“Workers tend to point to low pay and limited career growth as the main reasons they are less interested in agriculture [jobs],” says a new ‘state of the industry’ report from the Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council (CAHRC).

The report, released today, quantifies the current agricultural labour deficit, drawing heavily on surveys done with employers and employees in 2023. The Conference Board of Canada conducted the study on CAHRC’s behalf.

The report noted that worker turnover is at a record high. In 2022, the voluntary turnover rate of agriculture jobs was 14 per cent, up from 10 per cent in 2018. The Canada-wide rate in 2022 was 7.7 per cent.

This varies widely across various types of agricultural jobs. Aquaculture jobs have a voluntary turnover rate of less than five per cent–the lowest of all ag sectors surveyed. Dairy comes in second-lowest with just under 10 per cent. “Support activities for farms” has the highest turnover rate of more than 20 per cent, closely followed by poultry and egg farming.

When asked why they thought employees weren’t sticking around, employers ranked “work is too physical” as the leading reason, with low pay and benefits as the second, and long working hours in third.

When asked what factors limited their interest in agriculture, more than half of employees said low wages and benefits. Limited career paths or opportunities for advancement came second, followed by low job security.

Less than 20 per cent said physical labour was a problem, as compared to nearly 40 per cent of employers. Just over 10 per cent said long hours was an issue, compared to about 30 per cent of employers.

CAHRC noted it surveyed people currently employed in agriculture.

The results suggest employers who prioritize wages and career opportunities could improve retention, CAHRC said.

The average agricultural wage is a bit less than $20 per hour, while the average Canadian wage is just over $25 per hour, the report said. Greenhouse and nursery, and fruit and vegetable workers tend to be the lowest paid. Grain and oilseed workers tend to be the highest-paid farm labourers, with an average wage of about $25 per hour. However, this still puts it behind manufacturing, which averages just above $25, and construction, which is just under $30 per hour.

None of these can compete, wage-wise, with oil and gas–its average wage is just shy of $40 per hour.

Yet, CAHRC noted that higher wages alone doesn’t eliminate vacancies.

Grain and oilseed farm worker wages are the highest in agriculture, yet these farms have a job vacancy rate of seven per cent. That’s lower than other agricultural sectors, but above the Canadian average of nearly six per cent.

“Employers in grain and oilseed struggle with recruiting because of their rural location, seasonal hours and manual labour needs,” the report said.

Employees also noted that work environment and management were important. Nearly 30 per cent cited poor management as their primary reason for leaving jobs.

Supply and demand

In general labour outlook, CAHRC reported that more than 28,200 jobs went unfilled during the peak season in 2022. Labour shortages caused a 3.7 per cent decline in sales in 2022, which resulted in lost sales worth an estimated $3.5 billion.

Agricultural employers are increasingly turning to foreign workers. Between 2017 and 2022, the number of foreign workers increased by more than 30 per cent.

CAHRC estimated that the domestic labour gap in the ag sector will increase 15 per cent by 2030. An aging population will be a key driver, as the ag industry will see over 85,300 retirements in the next eight years.

“Even with four out of five of otherwise vacant positions expected to be filled by foreign workers, 22,200 jobs will still be vacant during peak season… by the end of the decade,” the report said.

Crop production industries are projected to have the largest number of vacant jobs, with 15,200 in 2030.

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“The danger here might be that the sector might not live up to its potential,” said Nicholas Renzetti, research associate with Smart Property Institute, the group that wrote the report in partnership with the Future Skills Centre.

And that potential is enormous. Protein Industries Canada believes the plant-based protein sector could be contributing $25 billion annually to Canada’s gross domestic product by 2035.

“Manitoba alone wants to grow its protein sector by attracting $1.5 billion in investment and creating 1,550 jobs by 2025,” stated the report.

Major investments have already been made in the two prairie provinces.

Roquette opened the world’s largest pea processing plant in Portage la Prairie, Man., in 2021.

Cargill and Viterra have announced plans to build canola crushing facilities in Regina that will be operational by 2024.

Federated Co-operatives Ltd. and AGT Food and Ingredients are building a $2 billion canola crushing and biodiesel plant in the same city that will be completed by 2027.

Burcon NutraScience Corporation’s pilot protein ingredient plant in Winnipeg received funding in 2023.

But a survey of companies working in that space revealed that there are some significant hurdles to overcome for those plants to be successful.

“People are concerned that the persistent labour challenges might lead to a situation where the sector continues along but doesn’t expand to its full potential,” said Renzetti.

The case of Merit Functional Foods offers a cautionary tale along those lines, according to the report.

There were “sky-high expectations” when the company opened its 94,000 sq. foot processing plant in Winnipeg in 2021.

Two years later the firm declared bankruptcy despite receiving $116.5 million in federal and provincial funding.

“The company’s lack of success was attributed to factors ranging from the high costs of inputs to labour shortages to delays in new product development,” stated the report.

A survey by the Canadian Federation for Independent Businesses found that 63 percent of agri-food companies could not hire all the staff they needed.

“There is a lack of visibility and perceived attractiveness for food and beverage manufacturing careers,” stated the report.

Renzetti said that is odd given that it is the largest manufacturing sector in the country measured by employment and the second largest measured by sales.

It doesn’t help that wages paid in the food manufacturing sector are typically much lower than in competing sectors such as potash mining and oil and gas extraction.

Average pay in the food manufacturing sector was $21.20 per hour in 2020 compared to an average manufacturing wage of $30.36 per hour.

Another hurdle is that many food production facilities are in rural areas, which means there is a smaller talent pool to draw on and it is harder to convince newcomers to Canada to settle in those areas.

“We do think these are solvable challenges,” said Renzetti.

The first step is to create increased awareness of food manufacturing jobs starting at the educational institutes.

People training in information technology, engineering and data analysis might not be aware of these jobs.

One idea is to work with institutes to create job internships or to get them teaching specific technical skills unique to food manufacturing jobs.

Food manufacturers need to make better use of existing immigration programs, such as the Provincial Nominee Program, which he called a “standout” program.

The industry should also lobby hard to get plant-based protein manufacturing on the list of eligible industries for the federal Agri-Food Pilot program.

There needs to be better co-ordination and sharing of labour market data between provinces and with the federal government.

And there should be a wholistic approach to job creation that places an emphasis on quality-of-life aspects, such as providing adequate transportation, housing and child-care facilities to accompany the new job.

—Sean Pratt writes for the Western Producer from Saskatchewan.

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The economy added just a net 100 jobs last month, Statistics Canada said. Analysts polled by Reuters had forecast a net gain of 13,500 jobs and the unemployment rate to tick up to 5.9 per cent from 5.8 per cent in November.

The average hourly wage growth for permanent employees – a figure closely watched by the central bank – accelerated to an annual rate of 5.7 per cent in December – the highest since January 2021 – from 5.0 per cent in November, Statscan said.

“The main story here is we are seeing some cool down in the job market,” said Doug Porter, chief economist at BMO Capital Markets. “The one disturbing aspect for the (central) bank is that average hourly wages took a big step up in the month.”

The Bank of Canada (BoC) has said wage growth that sticks above 4 per cent would hinder its efforts to sufficiently cool inflation.

The Canadian dollar was trading 0.1 per cent lower at 1.3360 per U.S. dollar, or 74.85 U.S. cents, after earlier touching a 17-day low at 1.3398. The Canadian jobs figures were released at the same time as U.S. data, which showed the economy there added more workers than expected in December.

Wage growth in Canada has remained strong even though job growth has eased in recent months as the economy slows under the impact of the BoC’s 10 rate hikes between March 2022 and July 2023. Canada’s economic growth was flat in October.

“The stagnation in employment, which follows sluggish GDP growth last year, suggests that the impacts of high interest rates are becoming more widespread across the economy,” said Royce Mendes, head of macro strategy at Desjardins Group.

The BoC has left its key policy rate on hold at a 22-year high of 5 per cent since July as it weighs whether rates are high enough to bring inflation back to a 2 per cent target.

But with inflation slowly ticking down and an unexpected contraction in third-quarter gross domestic product, money markets and economists expect the bank to start cutting rates in the first half of 2024.

“With wage numbers like this, the Bank of Canada will remain concerned about the inflation risk being still slanted to the upside,” said Derek Holt, vice president of capital markets economics at Scotiabank. “Markets are still aggressive in pricing cuts as soon as the March or April meetings.”

Canada’s economy added an average of 23,000 jobs per month during the last half of 2023, compared with an average of 48,000 per month in the first half of last year, Statscan said.

December’s gains were entirely in part-time work that offset a job losses in full-time work. Employment in the goods sector decreased by a net 42,900 jobs, driven by losses in manufacturing, construction and agricultural jobs.

Those losses were balanced out by a net 43,100 positions gained in the services sector, led by increases in the professional, scientific and technical services as well as health care and social assistance.

In the services segment, the wholesale and retail trade sector recorded their third consecutive month of job losses, another sign of a slowing economy.

The central bank’s next rate announcement is on Jan. 24, after the release of December inflation data on Jan. 21.

–Additional reporting for Reuters by Dale Smith in Ottawa and Fergal Smith and Divya Rajagopal in Toronto.

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Dogs and their handlers competed at the seventh annual Cattle Dog Futurity and Maturity competitions and the International Stock Dog Trials held Thursday at Canadian Western Agribition.

The futurity event featured dogs born between November 2019 and October 2020 who were competing for the first time.

“We believe (they) should be in their prime of their training then. They’re young, viable, and should have enough training, or be trained enough, to come and display in town and educate everyone on the use of cow dogs and how it works,” said event organizer Marcel Vermette of Rafter V Ranch near Outlook, Sask.

Vermette competed with his dog, Jock, who was the event’s reserve champion in 2020.

Calin Duce of Cardston, Alta., brought his three-year-old dog, Tan, to compete in the futurity event before moving on to the stock dog event.

Duce said the dog learns how to read and adjust to different types of animals.

“It’s a little bit of a different game on maybe how you handle them, but it’s very similar to each other,” he said.

With 750 cow-calf pairs and 6,000 in the feedlot, Duce currently has 15 dogs on staff.

After they start to slow down, retirement can be pretty special, he said.

“Usually if a dog has made it to 10 years old with someone, they’re probably going to be sitting on the porch the rest of their life.”

One stock dog can replace three ranch hands, said Vermette, who owns a custom grazing operation.

Beyond the skill, agility, and intelligence of stock dogs, there are other reasons stock dogs are ideal, he said. “These guys show up to work. They’re never hung over. They don’t have to take kids to a ballgame early in the day, whatever. They’ll work till they’re dead. And so they really are the ideal employee.”

Vermette also sees them as better for his cattle herd.

“Cattle are a prey animal. They’re always a little anxious. And if they’re anxious, they’re not going to put weight on when we’re grazing because they’re always looking for that predator that’s coming together. Once we started working with them with the dogs, that anxiety comes back down to nothing.”

Agribition has been a good place to feature the stock dogs, Vermette said, with a great community of fellow handlers.

“We’re all just ranchers… you can brag about how good your dog is but until you bring him to town, it’s just talk,” he said with a laugh.

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However, large-scale grain farmers could also use the technology if they think about it differently.

“Let’s say my brother and me are growing 1,500 acres of corn,” said Baresich, who owns Haggerty AgRobotics and also operates Haggerty Creek Crop Inputs and Marketing at Bothwell, Ont.

“(So) why are we growing that corn instead of tomatoes instead of a higher-value crop?”

The answer is labour.

He cannot find farm workers or afford to pay labourers to kill weeds and manage a high-value crop such as tomatoes.

As a result, Baresich and his brother grow corn because it’s manageable.

“The weed control options for the vegetable crops… (it’s) too much labour and work,” said Baresich, who spoke at the Agriculture Enlightened conference held Thursday in Winnipeg.

The host and organizer of the conference was EMILI, which is trying to help Canada become a leader in digital and precision agriculture.

“EMILI works with producers, industry and academia to advance the adoption of intelligent technologies and provide people with the skills and training required to succeed in a digital economy,” its website says.

READ MORE: Think outside the agriculture box for labour

Baresich spoke at the event and was joined on stage by Rick Rutherford, who operates Rutherford Farms north of Winnipeg.

Rutherford doubts that robotic equipment to spray weeds and perform other field tasks are useful on a 7,000-acre grain farm in Western Canada.

“We’re definitely not into robots yet,” he said.

“The return on something like that, today, in broad-scale agriculture isn’t there.”

Baresich agreed.

Putting a small robot into the field can’t compete with a large and efficient piece of equipment.

“Rick is correct. On a broad-scale (situation), labour is your lowest cost. So, removing the driver out of the sprayer doesn’t make any sense,” he said.

“If you’ve got a 60-foot seeder that can seed 400 acres per day, it’s hard to replace that with a robot. The ROI (return on investment) doesn’t work.”

However, getting back to his example of 1,500 acres of corn, Baresich said a robotic machine could change what a farmer grows.

Instead of seeding 1,500 acres of corn, Baresich could plant 1,400 acres of corn and 100 acres of onions or another high-value crop because the robot would do the work of a couple of paid employees.

This isn’t happening on his farm yet.

“We’re looking at it very closely,” he said.

“What we’re seeing in Ontario, we’re seeing a growth in the vegetable market and the higher-value crops.”

That sort of approach to robotic farm equipment could make sense in parts of Western Canada.

The region around Portage la Prairie, Man., for instance, is a major producer of carrots, onions and other vegetable crops. Maybe grain growers in the region could dedicate a portion of their acres to a higher-value crop if the robot was able to reduce labour and production costs.

This sort of innovation and adoption of technology could become more critical for Canadian farmers.

However, producers may be hesitant to take the risk and test it out on their farms.

That’s the benefit of groups like EMILI, which operates Innovation Farms on Rutherford’s land north of Winnipeg.

Innovation Farms is part of a network of similar farms across the country, called the Pan-Canadian Smart Farm Network.

At these locations, innovators and entrepreneurs can test and refine their agricultural technologies at scale or demonstrate the value of more established technologies.

These farms are critical because Canadian farmers want to see something that works under real-world conditions.

“It’s fun to look at those things (new technologies like robots), but you’re not moving the needle by saying, ‘I did this on 200 square feet,’ ” Baresich said.

“You’re going to move the needle by saying, ‘I did this on 70 acres.'”

— Robert Arnason reports for the Winnipeg bureau of the Western Producer.

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“The immigration of scientists, data engineers, and entrepreneurs has been recognized as critical to Canada’s growth. A similar approach needs to be adopted to attract farmers,” the authors wrote.

The report, released Sunday and titled Farmers Wanted: The labour renewal Canada needs to build the Next Green Revolution, is a collaboration of the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), Boston Consulting Group and the Arrell Food Insitute at the University of Guelph.

It notes there’s a global crunch coming as many farmers near retirement age, and not enough is being done to fill that gap.

In Canada, 40 per cent of farmers are expected to retire by 2033, “placing agriculture on the cusp of one of the biggest labour and leadership transitions in the country’s history,” the report reads. That will come on top of an already-expected shortfall of 24,000 farm workers over the same time frame.

MORE READING: Does Canada have enough young farmers?

The report’s authors say the first short-term step in addressing this crisis should be to identify and recruit 30,000 permanent immigrants who want to establish their own farms and greenhouses, or take over existing ones.

Canada, they wrote, has had a long history as a destination for international farmers from the Netherlands, U.S., U.K., China and India — and there are new opportunities to “attract operators who have lost their farms because of regulatory policies in other nations.”

In the Netherlands, for example, 3,000 farmers with the largest emissions will be bought out in a 24.3 billion-euro (C$35.6 billion) program. The country will also have to reduce its livestock population to a third of its current size over eight years. In New Zealand, a 2019 law that requires producers to reduce emissions by 10 per cent in the next three years is already forcing farms to scale back. The EU has lost more than four million farms since 2005. It all adds up to a potential talent pool for the agriculture sector, the authors said.

In the medium term, Canada needs to do a better job of promoting “agricultural education across colleges and universities to attract new students,” and the report says the blueprint to expanding agriculture education is already in place.

Faced with falling student numbers in the 1990s, education institutions expanded their reach by revisiting their curriculum with an eye to drawing in students who weren’t from a farm background. They focused on topics outside of agricultural science, and included topics such as food security, sustainability and international development. Enrolment at ag schools bottomed out in 2003, and since then has grown by 40 per cent. Canada now has among the highest post-secondary agriculture enrolments in the developed world.

Despite this, the authors said there’s still room to further expand the scope of agricultural education in Canada.

“For instance, no full-time MBA program among Canada’s top 10 business schools currently offers elective courses in agribusiness,” they noted.

Longer-term, Canada should “accelerate the adoption of autonomous and mechanized solutions on farms.”

They write that “smart” agriculture technology and practices will promote higher levels of efficiency and productivity, reduce environmental impact and promote sustainability, as well as “reduce the need for low-skilled labour.”

The national shortfall, they said, is in the investments needed to develop the technology: “We should strive to be more ambitious with funding as every dollar invested in R+D generates $10 to $20 in GDP.”

Most of the money spent on this research comes from the public purse, to the tune of about $450 million in 2020. Private sector investment lags, at just $108 million the same year.

Capital investment in agriculture has risen faster than in other Canadian industries over the last 15 years, but has mainly been concentrated in the crops sector.

For farmers themselves, the report urges putting a priority on succession planning. It notes Canada’s farm acreage has declined from 167.01 million acres in the 2006 census, to 153.69 million in 2021.

“Without clear transition plans, valuable farmland may sit idle and unproductive,” the report said. “By contrast, clear and established plans make the process of transferring land, knowledge, labour and ownership easier for new generations taking over.”

Farm operators who want to sell their farmland should consider the sale to “eager new producers entering the industry, productive operators, or farmers new to Canada” to help ensure their land’s productivity does not slow.

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