Agriculture, Forestry and Rural Development proud of 2022 Budget

As part of Alberta's Recovery Plan, Alberta's government has a target to attract $1.4 billion in investment, creating more than 2,000 jobs in emerging sectors like hemp, agtech and value-added processing by 2023-24.

To meet that goal, Budget 2022 provides Results Driven Agriculture Research $37 million annually to support producerdriven research to power the competitiveness, profitability, productivity and sustainability of the agriculture industry.

To further support employment in agriculture, an Alberta at Work investment of $15 million over the next three years for the Investment and Growth Fund will create a new rural investment attraction stream to attract investment and create jobs.

To address the emerging shortage of large animal veterinarians in rural Alberta, $59 million over the next three years will go toward expanding the veterinary school at the University of Calgary.

“Great things are happening. To date, our $1.4-billion investment targeted toward value-added processing has led to 2,128 new jobs and $886 million in new investments. We anticipated this funding would create more than 2,000 jobs over the entire project and we are already past that initial estimate,” explained Nate Horner, Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Rural Economic Development.