Coloradans are about to enjoy the bounty of the summer: Rocky Ford melons, Palisade peaches, and Olathe sweet corn. But the farmers who grow that produce have a big problem. There just aren’t enough workers. “I cannot find domestic workers who want to work seasonally at any price,” said David Harold of the Tuxedo Corn Company in Olathe. He and
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A visa scheme for migrant farm workers was in place in some form between 1945 and 2014. Participants were typically students from European countries. The most recent incarnation, the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme, was restricted to Romanian and Bulgarian citizens from 2008. It was then scrapped altogether in 2014. The government considered that demand could be met by EU workers
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A bipartisan group of House lawmakers reintroduced legislation that would provide temporary immigration status for certain agricultural workers to help alleviate labor shortages in the farming sector. The so-called Farm Workforce Modernization Act, which passed the House in 2021 before stalling in Senate, would streamline the process of getting a temporary visa for farm work. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-30/us-house-members-reintroduce-farm-work-immigration-reform-bill
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A report from RBC has concluded that Canada will need around 30,000 immigrant farmers over the next ten years to start their own farms in the country or to take over existing farm operations. According to RBC, in ten years’ time, about 60 per cent of farm operators will be over the age of 65, representing the highest number of
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According to a Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) research, 40 per cent of Canadian farm operators will retire by 2033, placing agriculture on the cusp of one of the biggest labour and leadership transitions in the country’s history. Canada’s agricultural sector is among the most diverse in the world though the degree of demand for foreign workers differs significantly by
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The TFW program only “scratches the surface of the labour shortage,” said Evan Fraser, co-author of the report and director of the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph, where he is a professor of geography. In 2020, Canada started an agriculture-specific immigration pilot program designed to give a path to permanent residency for non-seasonal workers with experience, but it’s set to end
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India is estimated to become the most populous country in 2023, and its population is projected to increase by around 240 million over the next 25 years. The implications of this growth in population on the economy are multifaceted. On one side, as the population grows, there will be increased demand for goods and services. Over the last decade, the
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AG Recruitment, which had brought more than 1,450 Indonesian nationals to work on farms in the UK last year, has lost its licence as a sponsor of workers on the seasonal workers’ visa (‘SWV’) scheme for agricultural workers. The decision to revoke the licence followed accounts of some workers arriving in the UK with up to £5,000 of debt to brokers and in some
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The government is in “cuckoo world” when it talks of increasing produce, said a farmer who has lost £50,000 of asparagus due to a shortage of workers. Norfolk farmer Andy Allen could not get enough pickers and so a 10-acre field has been left unpicked. Farmers have been hit by the loss of EU workers after Brexit, the loss of
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Agriculture is an important industry for all EU countries and they all receive EU funds through the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). These funds support farmers directly through the European Agricultural Guarantee Fund and rural areas, climate action and the management of natural resources through the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development. The agriculture industry supported 9,476,600 jobs in 2019 and
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