Agriculture job crisis to hit from farm gate to dinner plate

The federal government says its two-day Jobs and Skills Summit at Parliament House won't be another talkfest and will deliver tangible solutions and promised to deliver tangible solutions.

Agriculture Minister Murray Watt said solving the sector's labour crisis would take a "combination of measures", including training up domestic workers.

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"The first step should always be making sure that we're offering locals training opportunities," Mr Watt said.

"There are increasingly skilled jobs that need filling in agriculture, and there's no reason why we can't provide training to locals to make sure that they have the skills that are needed to use the technology that is increasingly used on farms."

The federal government has indicated migration would play a big role in tackling the jobs crisis, and wants to shift the country away from temporary migration to permanent migration.

Mr Murray said the visa application backlog blew out to nearly a million applications under the Coalition government, and is investing additional resources to process the log jam.

Despite the government openly admitting migration was part of the solution for the national skills crisis, the Agriculture Minister is still resisting calls from the industry to put forward its own version of the Coalition's ag visa, which was scrapped after the election.

National Farmers Federation chief executive Tony Mahar said growers were making the difficult choice not to plant some crops because they can't guarantee they'll have workers for harvest.

"The farm sector's labour crisis is not only hurting farmers, it's hurting the economy and it's hitting consumers in the hip pocket," Mr Mahar said.

"It's a simple equation - if crops don't get planted, less food gets grown, and people pay more.

"We need appropriate visa solutions to attract workers and ensure they're treated fairly."

The meat processing industry is up to 4000 jobs short on any given day.

Multiple sectors say the lack of abattoir workers was a pressure point for the entire supply chain, particularly with livestock numbers predicted to increase up to 35 per cent by 2025

Australian Meat Industry Council chief executive Patrick Hutchinson said it would be "catastrophic" for farmers if the volume of livestock was far greater than what the meat processing industry could handle

"The post-farmgate meat supply chain is already under-resourced to process the number of livestock forecast to be produced in Australia in 2022," Mr Hutchinson said.

The $15-billion horticulture industry has a labour shortage of around 10,000 individual worker.

AUSVEG chief executive Michael Coote said many of those missing workers followed the harvest trail for seasonal work, meaning no part of the country was immune from the crisis, which will peak from winter to summer as production ramps up leading into the harvest period.

"Without immediate action, the compounding effect of this labour shortage, coupled with adverse weather conditions and rising farm input costs, will likely result in periods with higher prices for consumers and a higher likelihood of gaps in availability of some crops over the next 12 months," Mr Coote said.