Opinion: Encouraging more to farm could be an uphill battle

May 03, 2023

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.

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Video: Spring 2026 weather outlook for Wisconsin; What an early-arriving El Niño could mean

Northeast Wisconsin is a small corner of the world, but our weather is still affected by what happens across the globe.

That includes in the equatorial Pacific, where changes between El Niño and La Niña play a role in the weather here -- and boy, have there been some abrupt changes as of late.

El Niño and La Niña are the two phases of what is collectively known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO for short. These are the swings back and forth from unusually warm to unusually cold sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean along the equator.

Since this past September, we have been in a weak La Niña, which means water temperatures near the Eastern Pacific equator have been cooler than usual. That's where we're at right now.

Even last fall, the long-term outlook suggested a return to neutral conditions by spring and potentially El Niño conditions by summer.

But there are some signs this may be happening faster than usual, which could accelerate the onset of El Niño.

Over the last few weeks, unusually strong bursts of westerly winds farther west in the Pacific -- where sea surface temperatures are warmer than average -- have been observed. There is a chance that this could accelerate the warming of those eastern Pacific waters and potentially push us into El Niño sooner than usual.

If we do enter El Nino by spring -- which we'll define as the period of March, April and May -- there are some long-term correlations with our weather here in Northeast Wisconsin.

Looking at a map of anomalously warm weather, most of the upper Great Lakes doesn't show a strong correlation, but in general, the northern tiers of the United States do tend to lean to that direction.

The stronger correlation is with precipitation. El Niño conditions in spring have historically come with a higher risk of very dry weather over that time frame, so this will definitely be a transition we'll have to watch closely as we move out of winter.