Demand for agri-food sector workers expected to increase
Report from agricultural school shows four jobs for every one of its graduates
ST. THOMAS In Ontario’s largest industry, it’s about as close as it gets to saying the jobs are growing on trees. The downside? Those jobs, many of them in Southwestern Ontario, are going begging for bodies — a trend that’s only expected to get worse.
A recent report by Canada’s largest agricultural school says there are four jobs for every one of its graduates in the agri-food sector, a vast industry that extends from the family farm to giant food processors like those London has worked hard to land in recent years as it builds am industrial hub feeding off one of the nation’s richest farm belts. The bottom line? There’s growing worry Southwestern Ontario won’t be able to fill its own jobs in the burgeoning industry, forced instead to look elsewhere not just for labour, as many producers do now, but also the brain power the wider industry needs.
“I was just in a plant ... in Moncton and 75 per cent of the workers in that plant weren’t born in Canada. So, that’s the reality you would find anywhere in Canada, including southern Ontario,” said Sylvain Charlebois, a food industry expert formerly with the University of Guelph, whose Ontario Agricultural College painted the picture of the challenges ahead in the report.
The food industry was already under pressure to lay its hands on enough employees, no matter how many graduates schools pump out, Charlebois said.
The Guelph-based college, with a campus in Ridgetown, has increased its enrolment by 30 per cent over the last five years with a 50 per cent surge in students in key areas such as its bachelor of science in agriculture program.
Despite that, the gap between the number of graduates and employers’ needs is only expected to widen, warns the report — a snapshot of hiring trends, based on input by nearly 200 employers.
“I’m extremely worried. I mean, family farms are a vital part of our communities and a vital part of rural and small town Ontario,” said MPP Monte McNaughton, whose London-area farmbelt riding straddles three counties. “It’s something that the government should be looking into and something I’ll raise with the minister of agriculture,” said McNaughton (PC — Lambton-Kent-Middlesex).
An industry the province says is worth $37 billion, supporting more than 800,000 jobs, the agrifood sector needs help to encourage more young people to consider careers within it, said Marc Wales, an Elgin County producer and director with the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, the province’s largest farm group.
“We are the largest employer in the province,” Wales said. “As farms get bigger and they have more employees, we need people with good (human resources) skills .... We need young people in the industry. Lots of opportunity, we need people.”
Wales said the agriculture industry needs people at all levels, from low-skilled labour to highly-skilled technicians.
With more than 200 crops and commodities grown in Ontario, many of them in the southwest, the risk of not having enough people will eventually become a reduced range of products, he said.
“When you’re short of labour,” he said, “you will tend to grow less labour-intensive crops and more crops that don’t require anybody.”
Ontario Agriculture Minister Jeff Leal, in a written statement, said the province is trying to steer more young people into the agrifood sector, from the high school level to post-secondary school, including with scholarships.
The province has set a goal of 120,000 new jobs in agri-food by 2020, with food processing industries expected to account for half that number.
But Charlebois, now a professor of food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University in Halifax, said getting young people to think about the food industry as a career isn’t easy. Most schools that do so are focused on production, not the industry’s wider opportunities and needs, he said.
“Processing, distribution and retailing are often forgotten throughout that learning journey that students go through,” Charlebois said.
The Ontario Agricultural College survey found 77 per cent of food companies and 79 per cent of agri-businesses want potential employees to have formal training in food or agriculture.
Half of the food and 57 per cent of the agricultural employers surveyed said more than half their employees require or have postsecondary education.
In the London area alone, the food sector employs about 6,000 people, said Kapil Lakhotia, head of the London Economic Development Corp.
That workforce is only expected to grow, he said. It ranges from big names, like Labatt and German frozen pizza maker Dr. Oetker, to smaller companies like familyowned Sikorski Sausages.
“We have more than 60 companies in the food and beverage base and many of them are expanding,” he said, noting the development corporation has pursued foodprocessing employers able to tap the region’s farm belt and Great Lakes for food and water needs, and its strategic location along major highways.