Hiring local workers for on-farm jobs isn’t as easy as it sounds

Apr 22, 2020

COVID-19 has turned lives upside down right around the world. People are grappling with illness and death, with separation from family and friends, business closures, job loss, and general uncertainty about what lies ahead.

Things are no different for farmers, but many of us who grow fruits and vegetables have the added challenge this year of trying to get our international workers here and making sure we do everything possible to keep them safe and healthy.

That’s not without added cost, and while we recognize that COVID-19 is causing losses and increased expenses for everyone the longer this crisis continues, we appreciate the federal government’s recent announcement of financial support for employers of seasonal agricultural workers.

We also appreciate government willingness to exempt international farm workers from its COVID-19 travel bans. Simply put, without the approximately 20,000 seasonal workers who come to Ontario every year to work on fruit and vegetable farms, many crops wouldn’t get planted at all or in the case of trees, vines and perennial crops like asparagus, wouldn’t be maintained or harvested.

One of the questions I’m asked most often is why we need foreign workers at all – especially now when so many are out of work, why don’t we just hire locals? It sounds simple enough, but like so many things in our modern world, it actually isn’t.

Probably the biggest misconception people have is that farm work is unskilled labour. There’s no denying that for all of us in farming, the hours are long and the work is hard. But our farms have become highly specialized, with sophisticated technologies and stringent food safety certifications.

And it takes skilled workers to be able to properly prune a grape vine, thin an apple tree, grade asparagus or gently harvest and handle a peach so that it arrives on the grocery story shelf free of bruises and blemishes.

The vast majority of seasonal farm workers in Ontario come to the same farms every year – some of the workers on my Niagara-area grape farm have been with us for more than 20 years – and they know those farms, those crops and the jobs that need to be done as well or better than we do.

Source : OFVGA

Video: Evolution of Beef Cattle Farming

The Clear Conversations podcast took to the road for a special episode recorded in Nashville during CattleCon, bringing listeners straight into the heart of the cattle industry. Host Tracy Sellers welcomed rancher Steve Wooten of Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado for a wide-ranging discussion that blended family history and sustainability, particularly as it relates to the future of beef production.

Sustainability emerged as a central theme of the conversation, a word that Wooten acknowledges can mean very different things depending on who you ask. For him, sustainability starts with the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy grass, which supports efficient cattle capable of producing year after year with minimal external inputs. It’s an approach that equally considers vegetation, animal efficiency, and long-term profitability.

That philosophy aligned naturally with Wooten’s involvement in the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, where he served as a representative for the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. The roundtable brings together the entire beef supply chain—from producers to retailers—along with universities, NGOs, and allied industries. Its goal is not regulation, Wooten emphasized, but collaboration, shared learning, and continuous improvement.