Gaps in Canada's agricultural workforce add up to over 59,000 vacant jobs across the country — a void which cost the industry $1.5 billion in sales in 2014.
Of these 59,000 jobs, about 1000 come from empty positions in meat processing plants, and while that starts on the slaughter plant floor, the affects are felt throughout the food chain. A lack of workers at processing plants translates to a lower processing capacity — which hurts the farmer.
"When the plant calls up and says, 'Sorry, we can't take a truckload of pigs this week,' that's very problematic for us," says Mark Chambers of Sunterra Farms in Ontario. "On one of our farms, a thousand pigs are born every week, so that means a thousand have to leave, and we don't have space sitting there just in case something goes wrong — I mean it's expensive to build space you don't use."
Chambers — who has also worked on the Canadian Agriculture and Agri-Food Workforce Action Plan — says it's like a conveyor system, and when the processing component isn't moving, it creates the potential for short-term welfare issues on the farm due to overpopulation.
"Where do we put those animals?" he says. "They were bred four months ago, so if we want to stop that production, it's going to be four months for anything like that to change."
The frustration is shared by those running the meat processing sector.
Ron Davidson, director of international trade, media, and government relations with the Canadian Meat Council, spoke at the Canadian Agriculture and Agri-Food Workforce summit in Winnipeg this week. He says there are meat processing plants running today with 100 or more empty positions.
"These are critical jobs because in a meat plant when you have a shortage, you have to have people working on the slaughter end... and splitting the carcasses and turning them into quarters, so then we have to pull people away from the value-added, from doing the products," Davidson says. "This has a long-term impact on our sustainability because it's in the value-added products where the profit is."
But Davidson says meat plants need more than butchers or cutters working on the line — they need shippers, plumbers, electricians, salespeople — everything that goes into a business.
A large part of the problem comes from the locality of slaughter plants. Davidson uses Toronto — once nicknamed Hogtown — as an example: urbanites don't want slaughter plants in downtown city areas, so the facilities have to be located in rural communities. But the population isn't always there to sustain the operation, and people generally aren't willing to move from cities to rural communities.
Source : Portageonline