While the people owning and operating the farms, the number of people needed to run the farms and do the work keeps dropping steadily and the lack thereof hurts the overall economy.

Janice Goldsborough, the Human Resources and Training Coordinator with Manitoba Pork said the growing lack of available farm workers threatens to take a massive bite out of Canada’s economy.

Recruiting and retaining sufficient numbers of workers to maintain the smooth and efficient operation of their businesses keeps challenging employers in the livestock production and processing sectors as the demographics of agriculture change.

“We’re seeing more women taking over farms,” said Goldsborough. “Before women typically helped to take machinery out to the fields, bring meals out, etcetera, but now the women are taking a more active role. You might be driving down the highway and see women in the combines or on the tractors.”

She said not only are we seeing more women in the farm labour force and farm ownership, but also more educated people. The universities are a telling sign of that. More young people are going to school, whether it’s to take agriculture, diploma, or food sciences degree in some area.

“But the average age of our farmers is increasing averaging over 45,” said Goldsborough. “We see a large population over 60, and they’re going to be looking at retiring soon, so we’re seeing less available workers.”

The problem she said is people who own the farms are finding it much harder to get people to work on the farms resulting in a more significant shortage of getting local people to work on the farms.

The Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council said in 2014, over 26 thousand agriculture-related positions went unfilled and figure by the year 2025 that could be approaching 114 thousand jobs, a significant big loss to the Canadian economy.

Goldsborough said employers need to expand their recruitment beyond just the province to across Canada and a big source of workers come from other countries.

She said this lack of a bigger labour pool locally means the employers must look to seek workers from further away and with less past connection to agriculture.

“It used to be that farmers could hire local people,” said Goldsborough. “Now more people are looking at the national and even international levels to find people to keep farms operating let alone to expand. It seems there are not as many young people wanting to take over the farm.”

In the past, as dads aged, they expected the next generation to take over automatically. Now, more sons and daughters realize that’s not the career they want, and young people aren’t looking at agriculture as the first choice of a career. Technology has changed a lot, and that’s impacted the number of people who are wanting to work on a farm, she said.

Goldsborough said by the employer taking steps to ensure employees feel valued as members of the team it goes a long way to keeping turnover low on the farm. While it is essential to value existing employees when the local pool keeps dropping, finding and hiring the right workers is costly and time-consuming it is vital to keep them than long-term.

“Recruitment costs money: You want to be able to keep them,” she said. “Therefore doing things like delegating, empowering them, and giving them a task also means to trust them to do the job. If they have questions, hopefully, they’ll ask. If they do it wrong, we all make mistakes, nobody’s perfect, so if they make a mistake, you show them the right way and let them do it again.”

Goldsborough said having good employee relations, talking to your employees, how are things going and being respectful to one another, having good policies that are clear, consistent for everybody and just making sure that communication is open, that it goes two ways and people feel it’s okay to raise issues, but also asked for their ideas. “Have regular staff meetings, offer some incentives, and it doesn’t have to be monetary. It can be as simple as having a group barbecue or going out bowling one night or something like that, something that makes people feel they’re part of the team,” she said.

Goldsborough said everyone knows there are positions throughout agriculture, both on the farm and in the processing plants are unfilled, so the retention factor is enormous. “When you find good people you want to keep them because if you do lose them, it’s going to be hard to find new ones to replace them.” • — By Harry Siemens