Labour shortage for rural employers is a major headache.An Alberta-based pork producer says farming operations in Canada face more obstacles and less support than in the United States and are losing ground competitively compared to international competitors.Ray Price, President of Sunterra Farms Ltd., which also has operations in Ontario, South Dakota and Iowa, told the Senate agriculture committee that Canada is falling behind the U.S., Australia and New Zealand in value-added agriculture.Taxation and regulatory policies are part of the problem, he said. “In our operations in South Dakota, the tax rate is 40 per cent below what it is in our operation in Alberta and about the same as in Ontario, so certainly that plays a factor.”Arranging for a new barn in South Dakota takes about three to four months while in Canada it drags on for six to 12 months, he said. “At the same time, there are a lot of U.S. banks that are willing to do agrifood.“Here, really the focus is only FCC, which does a great job, but they're limited. The big banks tend not to worry about agriculture. The portfolio relative to the big banks is small. They're sporadic. They will lend to land, but to lend to value-added agriculture is difficult.“So we have a lot of small barriers that add up that make it difficult to grow,” he said. In addition to raising pigs, the family-owned business has a pork processing plant in Trochu, Alberta and retail outlets in Calgary and Edmonton.Another major challenge for the company's rural operations is “we can't get enough people to continue to grow and be effective,” he said. That means a loss of export sales. “It's a difficult challenge for us to continue to get staffing for the operations that we have.”The company has used the Temporary Foreign Worker Program or as Price calls it, the transitional foreign worker program. “About 90 per cent of the people who come to us under that program we transition into Canadian citizens or landed immigrants. It has been a tremendous help for us but we are now impeded in that. Our meat processing plant has about 150 staff. We need 50 more and we cannot get them. That means about $15 million in lost export sales by not being able to have labour.”There's nothing temporary about the program for employers, he said. “It takes about six to eight months to train the staff. We pay well, usually in the $20 to $30 an hour range. In small-town Alberta, we think that is a pretty good wage.“I think a lot of the negative attributes around the TFWP are wrong,” he said. “We use it as a pathway to immigration and we need something like that. If we don't have an effective temporary foreign worker program that leads to immigration, we need something on the immigration side so we can bring in people. They can be trained, get a skill and make good wages, especially in rural Canada, where I think the bulk of value-added agriculture should and will be generated.”While the federal government keeps talking about hiring more Canadians, Price says they “would prefer to live and work in the cities and have different jobs than what we would have on the farm. There are lots of people in the world who would really like to come to Canada. Given that we all came to Canada at some point, it gives us an opportunity to develop those workers.“We can't get rid of the TFWP for a segment of agriculture and value-added sectors,” he said. “I'd like to see a pathway to immigration that is predictable.“To me, the day they land, they're starting to work, they pay taxes and they do all the things that we want them to do. If we can transition them into a permanent workforce, especially in rural Canada, it's a benefit to the Canadian economy both in terms of their contribution but also in taxes in rural communities.”Canada has many of the ingredients needed to be a food superpower, he said. “We've got land, water, and we should produce a lot of food for the world. We have some impediments and barriers holding us back, and we need to move on.”Price called for quick passage of legislation to make Canada a member of the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership. “It is critical that we access markets. On the pork side, as an industry we export over 60 per cent of our production, so it is critical that we continue to get good access to markets.“Farmers are getting better and better at producing. In our case, we produce canola as one of our crops and we probably produce 100 per cent more per acre than we did 10 years ago. We will just get better and better at producing moreAlex Binkley is a freelance journalist and writes for domestic and international publications about agriculture, food and transportation issues. He's also the author of two science fiction novels with more in the works.