As other nations reduce their agricultural footprints in an effort to boost sustainability, their loss could be Canada’s human capital gain, a new report suggests.
“The immigration of scientists, data engineers, and entrepreneurs has been recognized as critical to Canada’s growth. A similar approach needs to be adopted to attract farmers,” the authors wrote.
The report, released Sunday and titled Farmers Wanted: The labour renewal Canada needs to build the Next Green Revolution, is a collaboration of the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), Boston Consulting Group and the Arrell Food Insitute at the University of Guelph.
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It notes there’s a global crunch coming as many farmers near retirement age, and not enough is being done to fill that gap.
In Canada, 40 per cent of farmers are expected to retire by 2033, “placing agriculture on the cusp of one of the biggest labour and leadership transitions in the country’s history,” the report reads. That will come on top of an already-expected shortfall of 24,000 farm workers over the same time frame.
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The report’s authors say the first short-term step in addressing this crisis should be to identify and recruit 30,000 permanent immigrants who want to establish their own farms and greenhouses, or take over existing ones.
Canada, they wrote, has had a long history as a destination for international farmers from the Netherlands, U.S., U.K., China and India — and there are new opportunities to “attract operators who have lost their farms because of regulatory policies in other nations.”
In the Netherlands, for example, 3,000 farmers with the largest emissions will be bought out in a 24.3 billion-euro (C$35.6 billion) program. The country will also have to reduce its livestock population to a third of its current size over eight years. In New Zealand, a 2019 law that requires producers to reduce emissions by 10 per cent in the next three years is already forcing farms to scale back. The EU has lost more than four million farms since 2005. It all adds up to a potential talent pool for the agriculture sector, the authors said.
In the medium term, Canada needs to do a better job of promoting “agricultural education across colleges and universities to attract new students,” and the report says the blueprint to expanding agriculture education is already in place.
Faced with falling student numbers in the 1990s, education institutions expanded their reach by revisiting their curriculum with an eye to drawing in students who weren’t from a farm background. They focused on topics outside of agricultural science, and included topics such as food security, sustainability and international development. Enrolment at ag schools bottomed out in 2003, and since then has grown by 40 per cent. Canada now has among the highest post-secondary agriculture enrolments in the developed world.
Despite this, the authors said there’s still room to further expand the scope of agricultural education in Canada.
“For instance, no full-time MBA program among Canada’s top 10 business schools currently offers elective courses in agribusiness,” they noted.
Longer-term, Canada should “accelerate the adoption of autonomous and mechanized solutions on farms.”
They write that “smart” agriculture technology and practices will promote higher levels of efficiency and productivity, reduce environmental impact and promote sustainability, as well as “reduce the need for low-skilled labour.”
The national shortfall, they said, is in the investments needed to develop the technology: “We should strive to be more ambitious with funding as every dollar invested in R+D generates $10 to $20 in GDP.”
Most of the money spent on this research comes from the public purse, to the tune of about $450 million in 2020. Private sector investment lags, at just $108 million the same year.
Capital investment in agriculture has risen faster than in other Canadian industries over the last 15 years, but has mainly been concentrated in the crops sector.
For farmers themselves, the report urges putting a priority on succession planning. It notes Canada’s farm acreage has declined from 167.01 million acres in the 2006 census, to 153.69 million in 2021.
“Without clear transition plans, valuable farmland may sit idle and unproductive,” the report said. “By contrast, clear and established plans make the process of transferring land, knowledge, labour and ownership easier for new generations taking over.”
Farm operators who want to sell their farmland should consider the sale to “eager new producers entering the industry, productive operators, or farmers new to Canada” to help ensure their land’s productivity does not slow.
