Canada’s Farms Are Turning to Robotics for Efficiency and the Employment Gap

Jun 23, 2026

By Mallory Michaelis

Canada’s agricultural sector is often discussed in terms of land, weather and commodities. Increasingly, however, it should also be understood through the lens of automation. Robotics is moving from novelty to necessity on Canadian farms, driven by labour shortages, rising input costs, climate pressures and the need to improve precision. The shift is not confined to one part of the country or one farming model: it is appearing in prairie grain production, Ontario dairy operations, British Columbia vegetable farms and high-value greenhouse horticulture. Yet the country’s robotics transition remains uneven. Canada has promising pilot projects, credible research capability and public funding channels, but adoption still lags behind what the technology could enable.

The structural case for robotics is partly economic: Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada reports that crop production had a 4.0 percent job vacancy rate in 2024, above the national average of 3.3 percent, while greenhouse, nursery and floriculture production also remains under labour pressure. The Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council projects that more than 100,000 agriculture jobs could be vacant by 2030, with more than 85,300 workers, around 30 percent of the workforce, expected to retire over the same period. In that context, farm robotics is not best viewed as labour replacement; it is a tool for labour substitution where labour is scarce, and for labour augmentation where skilled oversight matters more than repetitive manual work.

Fragmented technological implementation

Canadian farming is more technologically intensive than many comparable countries. For example, Statistics Canada’s 2021 Census of Agriculture found that more than half of Canadian farms reported using at least one selected technology, with larger farms leading uptake as part of a broader modernization trend.

Source : uga.edu

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