Canada’s Agriculture Labour Market Forecast to 2030 – Executive Summary Report

Nov 03, 2023

The Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council (CAHRC) is pleased to share that the executive summary for the Agri LMI National Report is now available in the document library.

The executive summary reveals a critical 3.7% sales decline ($3.5 billion) due to over 28,000 unfilled jobs in 2022. Anticipating a 15% increase in the domestic labour gap by 2030, the report emphasizes collaborative efforts for sustainable solutions. Key strategies include improving the sector’s perception, enhancing HR practices, attracting skilled immigrants and embracing technology.

The full summary is accessible in the CAHRC document library.

The Executive Summary is part of the outcome of CAHRC’s update to it’s Labour Market Information conducted by The Conference Board of Canada.

Please look out for the upcoming national report, which will provide comprehensive data on the agriculture labour market.

Source : Cahrc.ccrha

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids