Canada Needs More Farm Workers

Jul 30, 2018

Finding good help on the farm or ranch can be a major challenge.

It’s not uncommon for some operations to hire custom harvesters to get the crop in the bin rather than run the risk of inclement weather or frost impacting the quality.

Norm Hall is Vice President of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture (CFA).

He says we’re seeing more migrant workers coming into Canada under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program or the Agricultural Stream of Temporary Foreign Workers Program.

“Foreign labor is a much higher percentage of the labor force and right now we’re seeing somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 placements short here in Canada in agriculture. Over the next ten years, that number will quite possibly double.”

He says some of the factors impacting the labor shortage is the change in the dynamic and size of farms, the government’s desire to increase agricultural exports and production, and the fact there are fewer and fewer farm kids.

“All of the developed agricultural countries are competing for the same workers. For a lot of workers, distance is an issue. For Nicaraguans, Canada is a long way away and the U.S. is a lot closer. The U.S. can bring their workers in a lot easier than we can in Canada, it takes a much shorter time to go through all the red tape.”

Source : Steinbachonline

Video: Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Plant breeding has long been shaped by snapshots. A walk through a plot. A single set of notes. A yield check at the end of the season. But crops do not grow in moments. They change every day.

In this conversation, Gary Nijak of AerialPLOT explains how continuous crop modeling is changing the way breeders see, measure, and select plants by capturing growth, stress, and recovery across the entire season, not just at isolated points in time.

Nijak breaks down why point-in-time observations can miss critical performance signals, how repeated, season-long data collection removes the human bottleneck in breeding, and what becomes possible when every plot is treated as a living data set. He also explores how continuous modeling allows breeding programs to move beyond vague descriptors and toward measurable, repeatable insights that connect directly to on-farm outcomes.

This conversation explores:

• What continuous crop modeling is and how it works

• Why traditional field observations fall short over a full growing season

• How scale and repeated measurement change breeding decisions

• What “digital twins” of plots mean for selection and performance

• Why data, not hardware, is driving the next shift in breeding innovation As data-driven breeding moves from research into real-world programs, this discussion offers a clear look at how seeing the whole season is reshaping value for breeders, seed companies, and farmers, and why this may be only the beginning.