Opinion: Encouraging more to farm could be an uphill battle

Canadian agriculture can be a tale of two solitudes: the Prairies and everywhere else.

But Canadian agriculture faces many common challenges such as trade issues, public perceptions and, at times, governments’ misunderstandings of how modern farming functions. Most commonly, though, it shares a labour crisis. Each sector and region experiences it, and deals with it, in its own way.

Royal Bank recently produced a report that highlights the lack of people available to do Canada’s farming today and, more emphatically, in the future. While some of the report’s findings don’t apply directly to prairie agriculture, much of it applies to all.

A shortage of workers on Canadian farms has been a reality for decades. Some of it is due to the seasonal nature of the work. The post-war era saw otherwise un- or under-employed migrant Canadians, often from the Maritimes or northern Quebec, regularly performing seasonal farm labour in both Western and Central Canada.