Opinion: Ways must be found to retain immigrants

Nov 21, 2023

Labour shortages in the agricultural industry continue to attract considerable attention. We covered it most recently on the front page of the Nov. 9 issue, which reported on a new survey from the Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council.

The results were predictably grim: 28,200 jobs unfilled during peak season in 2022, resulting in a 3.7 per cent decline in sales and an estimated $3.5 billion in lost sales for on-farm agriculture businesses.

The nationwide job vacancy rate was 5.9 per cent, but agriculture reported peak vacancy of 7.4 per cent.

The future isn’t expected to brighten anytime soon. The council forecasts that over the next eight years, the domestic labour gap will rise by 15 per cent from 87,700 this year to 101,100 in 2030.

To ease this situation, varied solutions will be required. On the home front, suggestions include better education of the domestic workforce to promote the opportunities available in agriculture. It’s a dynamic industry with jobs available from the basic to the high-tech, but that still doesn’t seem well-known outside agricultural circles.

More and more, however, the industry is looking outside the country for answers.

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Video: Western Canadian Agriculture: Hard Times Made the World's Best Farmers

Western Canadian agriculture produced the most advanced farmers in the world not through abundance but through adversity. The crow rate fell. The wheat price went nowhere. The brown envelopes stopped.

When the subsidies disappeared, the bad farmers left and the good ones stayed. And the ones who stayed could not just grow wheat anymore. They started growing lentils and canola and peas and flax and faba beans. They built crop rotation. They got serious about agronomy because there was no government backstop. That process produced the Western Canadian agriculture Dennis Bulani describes in this clip: the most advanced, most educated farming culture in the world.

His contrast with Iowa corn and soybean farmers is sharp. At a DeKalb farmer meeting in Okoboji, Iowa, he asked what crop rotation they ran. Beans on corn stubble, corn on bean stubble. How do you fertilize? The co-op agronomist handles it. Have you considered other crops? No need. We make so much money on corn and soybeans. Western Canadian agriculture was never allowed that comfort. And now those Iowa farmers are watching soybean markets lock up with China and corn prices slide, and they do not have the agronomy knowledge or the research base to pivot. Western Canadian farmers adapted on a dime because they had done it before.

Dennis also makes the case that Western Canadian agriculture keeps adapting in real time. Low commodity prices over the past year have pushed growers to look seriously at precision spot-spray technology. He knows a neighbor who bought a sprayer with the seeing-eye system and sprayed only 80 out of 320 acres. As a chemical retailer Dennis acknowledges that will affect his sales. He supports it anyway, because if it advances Canadian agriculture and makes farmers money, that is a good outcome.

The lesson Dennis draws from the tale of two farms: continuous improvement is the only durable strategy. When canola was $22 a bushel some growers went to Arizona instead of the Crop Production Show. When the price came down those same growers came back to the research and the discipline. Products do not go on Rack Petroleum's shelves unless they pass a replicated trial first. That is what Western Canadian agriculture built through hard times: farmers who do the work whether the times demand it or not.

Dennis Bulani is CEO of Rack Petroleum and Ultimate Yield in Biggar, Saskatchewan. Dan Aberhart hosts GTF Productions, Western Canadian Agriculture's foremost live briefing platform and its foremost AI training platform for ag operators