There are plenty of job titles in agriculture, including agronomist, soil scientist, livestock truck driver, veterinarian, lab technician, swine technician, grain merchant, seed sales rep and of course, agricultural journalist.
There are dozens more job titles, probably hundreds.
However, a survey last year of more than 2,000 Canadians who are not connected to agriculture determined that very few people can name any of those jobs.
“A majority (54 percent) of Canadians are unable to identify a job in the agricultural industry that is not a farmer,” the Canadian Agricultural Human Resources Council said in a report on the barriers to careers in agriculture published last fall.
Ipsos conducted the online survey in 2023, with respondents between the ages of 16 and 65 to reflect the population of Canada.
Jennifer Wright, executive director of CAHRC, hasn’t forgotten that finding from the survey.
It’s a reminder that agricultural leaders have “a lot of work to do.”
“Obviously, the job of a farmer is extremely important, but there are so many other occupations, jobs and career paths.… We need to be working to really be raising that awareness,” Wright said from her office in Ottawa in late February.
CAHRC has been trying to raise awareness about the labour shortages in Canadian agriculture and how to manage this crisis.
In mid-February, the council released a report called Sowing the Seeds of Change, an agriculture labour market forecast for 2023-30.
The report is 126 pages long and contains a massive amount of data, but the key messages are clear:
- More than 28,000 jobs went unfilled in the agriculture sector during the peak season in 2022.
- Those unfilled jobs caused lost sales of agricultural products worth an estimated $3.5 billion.
- By 2030 the domestic labour gap between Canadians willing to work in agriculture and the number of jobs available will grow to 100,000.
- That doesn’t mean 100,000 jobs will go unfilled, but temporary foreign workers and others will be desperately needed to fill them.
One of the key findings of the CAHRC report is that it’s getting harder to convince Canadians to work on farms. In many cases it’s impossible for farmers and companies in primary agriculture to hire Canadians because no one applies for the available jobs.
“More than one-third of employers (received) no applications from Canadians during this hiring season … while an additional 28 percent received only one or two applications,” says the Sowing the Seeds of Change report.
The data is from a CAHRC survey of farmers and primary agriculture employers in 2023 looking at their hiring challenges in 2022.
Alastair Bratton doesn’t need to look at such statistics.
He’s the production manager at Sunterra Farms, one of the largest hog producers in Alberta.
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