Higher produce prices coming
|With foreign workers in short supply, farmers are feeling the pinch
OTTAWA— The f rustration comes down the phone line as Curtis Millen talks about the season so far at his Nova Scotia strawberry farm.
COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on the growing season, in large part because travel restrictions and quarantines upended the annual arrival of temporary foreign workers vital to many agriculture operations.
Uncertain whether he would get the labour he needed, Millen and his sons cancelled plans to plant 12 hectares of the some 80 hectares he has reserved for strawberries. They couldn’t afford to take the financial risk.
“We didn’t have the labour to do it. We didn’t even know if we were getting the labour,” said Millen, who owns Millen Farms with wife Anne in Great Village, N.S.
Millen eventually did get workers — but not as many as expected and five weeks late. By then, the planting window was gone.
“There’s a time to plant and a time to harvest. If you miss the planting, you can’t harvest what you didn’t plant,” he said.
He’s not alone. Farmers across the country are feeling the pinch.
For Canadians, it could mean less choice, more out-of-country products and higher prices for fruits and vegetables.
The delay in getting workers into Canada through the spring spelled problems for the start of the growing season, when crops or planted or pruned. Now farmers are facing a fresh concern — getting workers for the harvests ahead.
Millen has 70 foreign workers now and another 72 were due to arrive Friday, short of the 250 workers he usually relies on.
The labour shortage means he will probably have to leave another 20 hectares of strawberries unpicked. He has no hopes that local residents will want the job of harvesting.
“It’s hard work. This COVID money, nobody wants to work,” Millen said of the federal benefits to people left without paycheques because of the economic shutdown.
Millen is bracing for all this to hit his bottom line. Millen and his two sons — who operate another farm — were originally aiming to pick two million quarts of strawberries worth about $7 million. Now they doubt they’ll get a million quarts off the fields this season.
Farmers in Ontario are also seeing a shortage of temporary foreign workers, said Mark Reusser, vice-president of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture.
“With the big mess we had this spring, there were an enormous number of delays. Even the workers that did come, were late,” he said in an interview. “The domestic workers that normally help, some of them chose not to do it this year.”
The requirement for foreign workers to quarantine when they finally arrived in Canada only added to the delay at a “critical” time, Reusser said.
“I know that the amount of fresh fruit and vegetables that was planted this spring so far is not nearly as much as it has been historically,” he said, adding that he expects less Ontario produce on store shelves from August onwards.
Statistics Canada says that temporary foreign workers are “critical” to agriculture, filling nearly 55,000 jobs in 2018, almost 20 per cent of the workforce in the sector with most of the work in fruit, vegetables, greenhouse and nursery operations.
So far this year, 28,000 temporary foreign workers for agriculture have arrived and about 37,000 permits have been finalized as of June 1, according to the federal immigration department. About 1,500 agricultural workers are arriving each week.
“We continue to see some challenges with more workers choosing to stay home this year and limited capacity for processing in worker’s home countries,” said Kevin Lemkay, press secretary to Marco Mendicino, the federal minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship.
In early May, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau unveiled $252 million in measures to support the food and agriculture sector, including $125 million to help offset the costs incurred by COVID-19.
Bill George, chair of the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers’ Association, expects staffing troubles to continue, citing for example, apple growers waiting for a second wave of foreign workers for the harvest in July and August.
“I expect there will produce on the shelves but maybe not as plentiful and maybe not the selection you are quite used to and pricing will be, I expect, higher,” said George, who operates a wine grape farm near Beamsville, Ont.
The agriculture associations are hoping the federal government will ready with additional financial support if farmers hit further troubles and with it, the real prospect of a money-losing year.
“We haven’t gotten through our growing cycle yet so we don’t quite know how this year is going to unfold for us,” George said.
“If we do run into some problems, we expect or hope that the government will be there to backstop us as they have other industries,” he said.
As he contemplates the uncertainty of this year’s harvest, Millen isn’t sure that politicians or the public grasp the challenges that confront farmers.
“I think the public takes food for granted,” he said.
“Why would a farmer want to farm, take all this chance, invest all this money and then find out he worked for nothing or lost money?”