May 1, 2020

Ontario grower: Hiring local workers isn’t as easy as it sounds

COVID-19 has turned lives upside down right around the world. People are grappling with illness and death, with separation from family and friends, business closures, job loss, and general uncertainty about what lies ahead.

Things are no different for farmers, but many of us who grow fruits and vegetables have the added challenge this year of trying to get our international workers here and making sure we do everything possible to keep them safe and healthy.

That’s not without added cost, and while we recognize that COVID-19 is causing losses and increased expenses for everyone the longer this crisis continues, we appreciate the federal government’s recent announcement of financial support for employers of seasonal agricultural workers. We also appreciate government willingness to exempt international farm workers from its COVID-19 travel bans.

Simply put, without the approximately 20,000 seasonal workers who come to Ontario every year to work on fruit and vegetable farms, many crops wouldn’t get planted at all or in the case of trees, vines and perennial crops like asparagus, wouldn’t be maintained or harvested.

One of the questions I’m asked most often is why we need foreign workers at all – especially now when so many are out of work, why don’t we just hire locals? It sounds simple enough, but like so many things in our modern world, it actually isn’t.

Probably the biggest misconception people have is that farm work is unskilled labour. There’s no denying that for all of us in farming, the hours are long and the work is hard. But our farms have become highly specialized, with sophisticated technologies and stringent food safety certifications. And it takes skilled workers to be able to properly prune a grape vine, thin an apple tree, grade asparagus or gently harvest and handle a peach so that it arrives on the grocery story shelf free of bruises and blemishes.

The vast majority of seasonal farm workers in Ontario come to the same farms every year – some of the workers on my Niagara-area grape farm have been with us for more than 20 years – and they know those farms, those crops and the jobs that need to be done as well or better than we do.

These aren’t skills that can just be taught on the fly. The other hard truth about farm work is that it needs to be done when Mother Nature is ready. Asparagus or strawberry harvest can’t just be put on hold because it’s raining, it’s too hot, or it’s the weekend. When work doesn’t get done, there is less produce on the shelves and likely at lower quality. Timing is everything in fruit and vegetable growing, making a reliable work force absolutely essential. As spring ramps up, there’s a lot of work to be done on our farms right now. But we will also need workers right through the summer and fall to see us through the busy harvest season.

When our economy starts to open up again and Canadians go back to their real jobs, we will still need people to pick apples, harvest grapes and get fields and orchards ready for winter. Most farms are in rural areas, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage in this situation. Once our international workers arrive, they live and work on our farms so keeping physical distance from local towns is not difficult.

Food and groceries are delivered and online banking is set up so workers don’t need to leave the farm, minimizing risk of disease spread. It’s much harder with local workers who have to travel back and forth from their homes daily and have more interaction with their communities. There are also no public transit options outside of cities, so unless people have their own transportation, they wouldn’t be able to get to work.

It’s also important to note that for farmers, foreign worker programs are Canadian-first programs. That means we only hire international workers if we can’t find Canadians to fill those jobs. And we can’t ignore what these jobs mean to the workers themselves. They come to Canada from Mexico, Jamaica and the Caribbean to support their families and communities, earning more in their few short months here than they could in a year back home.

Even with the travel exemption now in place, the reality is that many farmers will still be short workers this year. There are jobs on Ontario farms and we are hiring, but without our international workforce, our grocery store shelves and dinner tables could look a lot different this year.

– Bill George is a winegrape grower in Niagara, and chair of the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers’ Association.