The P.E.I. Farm Team program is open to high-school and post-secondary students
By Diego Flammini
News Reporter
Farms.com
A program in Prince Edward Island is encouraging students in the province to work on farms and in processing plants.
The P.E.I. Farm Team program allows students going into Grade 11 or 12 to earn $500 bursaries in addition their wages. Students headed to college or university in the fall can earn a $1,000 bursary.
The federal and provincial governments, along with sector partners, will fund the program, which will be run like the Team Seafood program launched two years ago. More than 100 students collected bursaries from the seafood program in 2017.
“It just made sense to use Team Seafood as a starting point and build off of its success,” Laurie Loane, executive director of the P.E.I. Agriculture Sector Council, told Farms.com today.
Interested farmers and students can go to a new website to find job opportunities or potential employers.
“If they fill out a form on the bottom of the website, it gets sent to the farm team,” Loane said. “If they have farms in that area, they will make a connection between the farmer and the interested student.”
The goal is to have 350 students enroll in the Farm Team program this summer. Each student must work at least 250 hours on the farm to earn his or her bursary.
Students could also be placed in areas that require the most assistance.
“It depends on the commodities, sometimes we have dairy farms that are looking for people and they have a hard time because it’s early hours in the morning,” Loane told CBC on Feb. 28. “Our fruit and vegetable growers, they sometimes have a hard time (finding workers) just because it’s labour intensive.”
Agriculture accounted for 3.0 per cent of employment on P.E.I in 2017, according to a provincial economic update. That number was down from 3.2 per cent in 2016.
Introducing young students to agriculture early in their high-school careers could be a factor in leading them to a career in agriculture.
“The goal is that these farms can use the employees for a longer period of time because that employee will continue to come back,” Loane told Farms.com. “For every student coming out of university with an ag background, there’s two to three jobs waiting for them. Sometimes it can be hard finding students interested in agriculture.”
Top photo: sergeyryzhov/iStock/Getty Images Plus