Farmscape for October 25, 2018

The Human Resources and Training Coordinator with Manitoba Pork says employers within Canada's livestock production and processing sectors are increasingly being forced to seek workers from further away and with less past connection to agriculture.
Employers in the livestock production and processing sectors are finding it increasingly difficult to recruit and retain sufficient numbers of workers to maintain the smooth and efficient operation of their businesses.
Janice Goldsborough, the Human Resources and Training Coordinator with Manitoba Pork, says, as the younger generation migrates to careers outside of agriculture, we're seeing the average age of farmers increase and finding and keeping workers is becoming more challenging.

Clip-Janice Goldsborough-Manitoba Pork:
It used to be that farmers could just hire people locally but that's been getting more and more difficult.
Now more people are having to look at the national and even international level in order to find people, in order just to keep farms operating let alone those people who want to expand.
What's happened is it seems that there's not as many young people wanting to take over the farm.
It used to be just expected that, when Dad got older, that the next generation, it was expected that they would automatically take over.
But more and more guys are realizing that that's not the career that they want and young people aren't looking at agriculture as the first choice of a career.
Technology has definitely changed a lot and that's impacted the number of people who are wanting to work on a farm.

Goldsborough notes the average age of farmers is over 45, there's a large number over 60 and as those people retire the shortage of workers will continue to increase.
She says the Canadian Agriculture and Human Resource Council determined, in 2014 there was over 26 thousand agriculture related positions that went unfilled and by 2025 that number could approach 114 thousand.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork