Canadian cattle ranches and feedlots were short 8,000 workers in 2015, a labour crunch that is only expected to worsen and is raising concerns about animal welfare, new research from the Canadian Agriculture Human Resource Council warns.

“It is staggering. The numbers are shocking,” the council’s executive director, Portia MacDonald-Dewhirst told delegates at the annual Canadian Agri-Food Policy Conference in Ottawa Thursday.

Those shortages, MacDonald-Dewhirst said, are all on-farm and do not include the more than 1,000 known vacancies in meat packing and processing plants.

With so many jobs going unfilled, MacDonald-Dewhirst said the “critical labour shortage” in Canada’s beef sector is one of the worst in Canadian agriculture. Only the horticulture and greenhouse industries are facing a tighter labour market, she said – adding the livestock sector is becoming increasingly concerned about animal welfare.

“Caring for livestock is a 24-hour job, that happens 365 days a year. It doesn’t matter if it’s cold outside. It doesn’t matter if it’s a holiday. It doesn’t matter about your work-life balance and it doesn’t matter if your short workers, those animals need to be cared for,” she explained. “When we have critical shortages we are concerned about animal welfare.”

The Council’s latest findings come as Canada’s $106 billion agriculture sector continues to grapple with a burgeoning labour shortage that producers and processors fear could cripple the industry in the next 10 years.

“The number one risk to business success is labour. This is not well understood,” MacDonald-Dewhirst said.

Nearly a third of Canada’s agriculture workers are expected to retire over the next decade, MacDonald-Dewhirst said – attrition that the industry will be unable to fill with its current labour supply.

Canada’s agriculture industry has been pushing the federal government to create a permanent immigration stream for low and high-skilled farm workers for more than a year since Conservative changes to the Temporary Foreign Worker program exacerbated the problem.

Canada’s agriculture sector currently brings in more than 40,000 foreign workers annually – the majority of which are part of the Seasonal Agriculture Worker Program.

The Council’s labour task force – backed by 65 industry groups – wants a meeting with Labour Minster MaryAnn Mihychuk to talk about the crisis, a shortage the minister told The Canadian Press in early January was not an immigration issue.

As of Thursday, a meeting between the minister and the task force had yet to be arranged.

Thursday’s findings are part of a wider study of the Canadian agriculture sector and its work force by the Canadian Agriculture Human Resource Council as part of its labour task force. It’s full findings are set to be released at a summit in Winnipeg in March.

Canada’s agriculture industry employs more than 2.1 million Canadians. One in eight jobs is tied to the sector. The industry is expected to generate more than 73,000 new job opportunities by 2022 – a third of which are anticipated to go unfilled.