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Agri-food: With four Ontario jobs for every college graduate, employers face huge challenges in the southwest's vast farm belt

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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 new 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 just last week in Moncton (New Brunwwick) 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 a recent report.

The food industry was already under pressure to lay its hands on enough employees, Charleobois said, no matter how many grduates schools pump out.

The Guelph-based college, with a campus in Ridgetown in Chatham-Kent, 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 graduates and employers’ needs is only expected to widen, the report — a snapshot of hiring trends, based on input by nearly 200 employers — warns.

“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 farm belt 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, a Progressive Conservative for Lambton-Kent-Middlesex.

An industry the province says is worth $37 billion, supporting more than 800,000 jobs, the agri-food sector needs help to encourage more young people to consider careers within it, says Mark 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 HR 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 agri-food 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, says 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 OAC report fsurvey 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 post-secondary education.

In the London area alone, the food sector employs about 6,000 people, said Kapil Lakhotia, head of the London Economic Development Corp. (LEDC).

That workforce — it ranges from big names like Labatt and German frozen pizza-maker Dr. Oetker, to smaller companies like family-owned Sikorski Sausages — is only expected to grow, Lakhotia said.

“We have more than 60 companies in the food and beverage base and many of them are expanding,” he said, noting the LEDC has pursued food-processing employers able to tap the region’s farm belt and Great Lakes for food and water needs, and its strategic location along major highways.

lbroadley@postmedia.com

Ag report by The London Free Press on Scribd

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ONE GRADUATE’S STORY

Who: Dennis Catt, 22, St. Thomas

Education: 2017 OAC graduate, bachelor of science in agriculture; certificate in business

Catt did a bachelor of science in agriculture because his parents own a dairy farm in St. Thomas. He’s working at Scotiabank in St. Thomas as a small business advisor, focusing on agricultural lending.

“My end goal is to eventually run the dairy farm, but I took the degree as insurance if something ever happens to the dairy farm,” he said.

Catt said he plans to be in the off-farm workforce for about 10 years before he ends up back on the farm.

Getting started was easy for Catt, who said he was offered two jobs before he was out of school. He started working at Scotiabank in January and didn’t graduate until April.

“I would say to a graduate of the OAC to look at all your options, and if you’re willing to travel there’s an awful lot of jobs . . . There are a tonne of jobs,” he said.


Dennis Catt

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WHAT OTHERS SAID

“(The report) is worrying, because it suggests that our educational system, or the linkages between our post-secondary education and local labour markets are not as strong as they should be.”

MPP Peggy Sattler (NDP — London West)

“It’s a good thing in one way, right? When a grad comes out of Guelph they know they have a good job selection. . . (But) “I think in some areas where agriculture isn’t as prominent as in others . . . there is, sad to say, a bias against the agricultural industry.”

MPP John Vanthof, NDP agriculture critic

The industry has known for some time there is a skill shortage, one he attributes to several factors. “One of them is that we have not done, as an industry, a very good job of selling our industry as an attractive place to create a career.”

Norm Beal, chief excecutive, Food and Beverage Ontario, an industry umbrella group

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SELECTED AGRI-FOOD JOBS AND WHAT THEY PAY

Cooks: $26,000

Butcher, meat cutter: $36,000

Biological technologist: $55,000

Chemical technologist: $59,000

Chemist: $70,000

Soil scientist: $80,000

Nursery/greenhouse operator/manager: $95,000

Source: Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Development

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