Message from the Chair of the Board of Directors

This summer, I had an opportunity to write an article about the need for agriculture to take a leadership approach to human resource management. For today’s farmer, this means attracting and keeping people with the right skills and education to work on the farm – and updating workforce development strategies.

To play its part, the Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council is accelerating the dialogue on agriculture’s human resource management issues, sharing farm HR practices, and developing tools to help this industry grow beyond the status quo.

The recently completed Labour Market Information on Recruitment and Retention project has given us a better understanding about agriculture's HR challenges. We've pulled all of the key findings from this study into a two-page fact sheet, which I encourage you to print from our Web site.

Building on the success of the AgriTalent.ca database of agriculture learning programs, we’ve also started a new project to find out about the learning programs offered by agriculture associations so we can add these to the database.

The launch of AgriTalent.ca in June received a fair degree of media attention. Coupled with the interest that the Labour Market Information project continues to generate, we decided to add an In the News section on our Web site and to this edition of Field Notes.

CAHRC is working hard to ensure that the next generation of farmers can sustain a successful and interesting career. On-the-farm demographics are changing, but people remain the key to any successful operation.

If you want to maintain the farm, you need to incorporate an HR plan. We’re here to help. I encourage you to join in this dialogue and participate in our activities.

Terry Murray