What We’re Reading | Canadians won’t work on farms: survey

The Western Producer by Robert Arnason

About three million Canadians lost their jobs last spring as COVID-19 forced thousands of businesses to shut their doors or lay off staff.

Many farmers needed employees last spring and summer, but few Canadians applied for farm jobs, despite record levels of unemployment across the country.

A survey of farm operators has found that 41 percent of producers could not recruit a sufficient number of workers in 2020.

And more significantly, fewer Canadians were interested in available farm jobs compared to previous years.

“Seventy-one percent of employers (farmers) who reported labour shortages cited fewer Canadian applicants,” the Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council (CAHRC) said in a report released this morning.

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