Hard row to hoe

An estimated 85,000 farmers are on track to retire in the next six years, and they won’t necessarily be replaced, according to the Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council. It’s difficult “attracting employees to the sector due to challenges such as rural location, type of work and wages,” the Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada reported in 2023. It’s just one reason for the prediction that, in a decade, many Canadian farms won’t exist anymore.

“In the Annapolis Valley [Nova Scotia], it’s scary how many fairly significant farms have shut down since the pandemic,” says Ted Hutten. Farmers are retiring and their children don’t see a viable future for the farms. When it comes to small-scale, sustainable farms like Hutten’s, he isn’t sure about their future either: “My gut feeling is that within the next five to 10 years, farms like mine will no longer exist at all in the country.” He predicts they’ll be turned into “experiential places,” where the product will be the therapeutic benefits people get from being on a farm, not the food that’s grown.

Ian Greydanus, a member of Grace Christian Reformed Church in Cobourg, Ontario, hasn’t felt the labour shortages on his farm – yet – but he’s heard other farmers talk about how local help is increasingly erratic. But he wouldn’t say farming is doomed. Greydanus’ children just bought him out of his family farm. “It’s their turn.” Greydanus’ parents were dairy farmers, and he reflects that they probably had similar questions about the future of farming: “We figured it out and kept going. So yes, there will be a lot of challenges – and the challenges will change – but the basic concept of it will not. Our children will figure out a way around it, or a way to work with it.”

Heather Watson, executive director of Farm Management Canada, agrees. “Scarcity breeds creativity,” she says, “and problems lead to innovative thinking. It’s important to remember our agricultural sector is founded in innovation and problem-solving. If we could put as much energy into the labour shortage as we do to yield and growth rates, imagine what we could accomplish.”

Offshore help

In 2021, Statistics Canada reported that a quarter of all of Canada’s agricultural work is done by hiring temporary foreign workers. “It’s an extremely controversial thing,” Hutten says, when I ask about the labour market. Around 18 years ago he decided to only hire local workers. He currently has five employees and grows stone fruits, apples, pears and 300 varieties of vegetables on a small acreage. “You have to pay good wages and give people an interesting week”; agriculture has developed a reputation of being difficult, monotonous work. Hutten has retained most of his workers, but he’s still noticed the changes in society. “Twenty years ago it would be not uncommon for me to get 15 resumes handed to me from young people in the community,” but “I haven’t seen a resume like that in maybe five years.”

Hutten sees the injustice of paying migrant workers minimum wage, especially when they work the same farm for over a decade. “I think it’s absolutely an injustice, but I think the injustice, by and large, is caused by the consumer. How often do people say, ‘food is a foundational human right’? The translation for half the population is, ‘therefore farmers should work for free.’” Hutten doesn’t pin it all on the consumer – there are other factors – but consumers can expect a lot from farmers without realizing what they actually face. “Unless you’re selling directly to the consumer like I’m doing, farmers don’t have a lot of negotiations in terms of the prices they’re given. The opportunity for a lot of producers to pay above minimum wage is tight; it’s very difficult.”

Greydanus’ farm increased everyone’s salaries by a third after covid, in response to rising living costs. Greydanus grows corn, soybeans, wheat and edible beans on 3,500 acres. He estimates that a thousand acres is needed to sustain one good salary. “We’re forced to get large, otherwise you’ve got to get out.” It’s a question, for both Greydanus and Hutten, of math. They recount the examples: production costs have doubled (sometimes tripled) and food prices have not kept pace. “So we have to find that difference someplace, so we do the economics of scale, right?” asks Greydanus. Those economics sometimes translate to diesel: “And actually the diesel fuel used per acre is very low, with our new type of farming,” but it’s easy, Greydanus notes, for farmers to be turned into environmental scapegoats by politicians. “True farmers are less than one percent of the population, so they’re not going to get hurt in the polls for that.”

‘Learn the soil’

I can’t count how many times Greydanus said “we are learning” in our half-hour phone call. He’s brought 45 crops to harvest and during that time the yield has over doubled: “I don’t believe that we are degrading our soil. We have some issues. We’re still learning – especially on some of our hills, we try and keep our soils covered with a plant residue, preferably live, all the time. It’s a challenge.”

“We do a lot of no-till, minimum till. The more you till soil the more you compact it.” It’s not as straightforward as it first appears: “Everybody kind of hates Round-Up, but before that we couldn’t control the weeds; we had to do that with tillage.”

Learning, Greydanus says, included courses through the government when he was first branching away from dairy and into cash cropping. Lots of field trips. Lots of trial and error. His children, who have taken over the farm, studied agriculture and mechanics.

Although his farm competes alongside others in the international grain trade, a market set by the Chicago Board of Trade, he doesn’t believe that the government should step in to help farmers make changes around their soil approaches. “As soon as you legislate, you take out research, trial and error.” He wonders how one rule could work for “such a vast country.” “I know the difference between individual fields, like I have sand bridges and then low clay areas, how differently we have to use them, and you talk Canada-wide, the soils and climates are so different, one rule won’t work across the country.” Private farmers will figure it out. He’s confident about that: “I’m concerned about it but then also, the Lord has blessed us with brains.”