Reading Time: 4 minutes Washington | Reuters — The new North American free trade pact would modestly boost the U.S. economy, especially auto parts production, but may curb vehicle assembly and limit consumer choice in cars, a hotly anticipated analysis from the U.S. International Trade Commission showed on Thursday. The ITC report is a crucial step in the push […] Read more
USMCA deal modestly boosts U.S. economy, trade panel finds
Grow your people
On a global tour, Nuffield Scholar Reece Curwen finds the top farms always treat employees as an investment, not a cost
Reading Time: 5 minutes At 32, Reece Curwen farms with his family 500 kilometres south of Perth in Western Australia, where the farm produces canola, barley, wheat and sheep on 8,000 hectares. Yet although the farm is so geographically distant from Canada, when it comes to the people management side of farming, it might be right next door. As […] Read more
Time to talk: Building teamwork
In this pair of articles, we find all this talk about communication is more than a trend gone wild. It really does pay
Reading Time: 4 minutes When bad farm managers have bad farm teams, they blame bad employees. And sometimes it seems they have a point. I mean, who hasn’t had an employee who never gets down to work, who makes endless mistakes and who constantly gripes with other staff? But the trouble is, ineffective or inexperienced farm managers can’t see […] Read more
Selling sales
When schools look down on sales, marketing and personal skills, you the farmer lose as much as the students
Reading Time: 5 minutes Ask most recruiters or human resource professionals working in ag today and they will tell you there is a growing gap between the skills needed to perform key roles in agribusiness and the skills that high school, college or university students can bring to the job. Lori Litherland, founder of agricultural recruiter Litherland and Company, […] Read more
Strategies for successful onboarding
There are better ways for getting a new employee off to a great start, and they really do pay
Reading Time: 5 minutes “I wish they’d told me I was expected to make it a priority for my job” is a refrain Michelle Painchaud hears all too often. Employers somehow think that new employees should simply “get it,” say Painchaud, president of a Winnipeg company that specializes in helping farm businesses recruit and retain new employees. Unfortunately, it’s […] Read more
‘Redirection’
Is it better to keep farming into your 70s, or to retire off the farm in your early 60s? New research suggests that what you may really need is a rewarding change of direction
Reading Time: 8 minutes It’s easy to see the two pincers coming together, at least when you look at farming from a national perspective. The average Canadian farmer is 55, on the one hand, and the average Canadian retires at 62 on the other. But let’s put a best-case face on it. For self-employment Canadians — the category that […] Read more
Hiring refugees
A small non-profit in Belleville, Ont., has helped 90 Syrian refugees find good jobs on farms and in the ag and food sector. Now other regions across Canada are replicating their model
Reading Time: 4 minutes Shortly after coming to power in Ottawa, the federal Liberals announced Canada would help relocate displaced Syrians, and the program has proved widely popular. Across the country, over 350 communities have welcomed more than 40,000 Syrian refugees. In the midst of it all in 2015, details on how this relocation would be achieved were scarce. […] Read more
The job ahead
Canada faces its own farm labour gap, and it’s going to get much worse
Reading Time: 15 minutes A black binder sits on the table next to the job board at Aylmer Community Services. Glued to its cover is a stock photo of two hands holding a tiny seedling. Red letters proclaim its title: Agricultural and Farming Jobs. In the steady stream of job seekers, however, few visitors to the jailhouse-turned-community service centre […] Read more
The multicultural workforce
Reading Time: 4 minutes At the end of the day, Tom Maloney says it all comes down to respect. The senior extension associate at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University has spent decades studying how to successfully manage multicultural teams, and he has advised farmers on how to best manage migrant labour […] Read more
Sharp differences over labour surface at NAFTA trade talks
Reading Time: 3 minutes Mexico City | Reuters — Tensions over sharp differences in pay between Mexican workers and their Canadian and U.S. counterparts surfaced on Sunday as negotiators discussed labour market rules in talks to overhaul the North American Free Trade Agreement. Canada’s biggest private-sector union said NAFTA should be scrapped if Mexico cannot agree to better labour […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
