August 4, 2016 – Van Raay Paskal Farms Ltd. (VRP Farms) is located near the rural Alberta town of Picture Butte – about 240 km south of Calgary with a population of 1,650. VRP Farms owns and operates seven feedlots housing up to 130,000 head of cattle and crops more than 22,000 acres that produce barley, corn and wheat silage/roughage for the feedlot cattle. Essential to the farm’s success are its approximately 170 employees.
“It’s a win – win situation,” explains Jolayne Farn, human resource manager for VRP Farms. “VRP Farms has created a pathway to citizenship for foreign workers so they can stay, thus ensuring that VRP Farms has enough employees long-term and the workers can build their future in Canada. So far we have had a strong response and much success.”
The Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council (CAHRC) has studied the VRP Farms example of successful workforce retention so that others can emulate their best practices. CAHRC’s mandate is to help alleviate the chronic labour shortage facing Canadian agriculture through its Labour Market Information (LMI) research and developing appropriate labour support tools. CAHRC recently released research indicating that annual farm cash receipt losses to Canadian producers due to job vacancies are $1.5 B or three per cent of the industry’s total value in sales. The current gap between labour demand and the domestic workforce is 59,000 and projections indicate that by 2025, the Canadian agri-workforce could be short workers for 114,000 jobs.
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