Through Switzerland, many farms are struggling to recruit
Keystone / Jean-Christophe Bott
Faced with the difficulties of recruiting qualified personnel, many Swiss farms are now turning to volunteers to hold on during the summer season.
At the Corjon pasture, located in the town of Rossinière, in the canton of Vaud, the Tena family manufactures Etivaz every summer, AOP cheese. From the end of May to the end of September, Julie and Julien Tena, who live in Albeuve (FR), live there with their three children, Emma, Martin and Romain.
For Julie, training farmer, reconciling workload and family life becomes more complex each year. “When Emma was born, it was fine. Afterwards, I had Martin and then Romain. There, for me, it was a little too much. We needed someone to help me, because I couldn’t manage everything anymore, “she told the morning of the RTS.
To hold the pace, the couple called on Caritas, who coordinates volunteer missions. Several volunteers will take turns this season by their side. A chance, because according to the association, more than a hundred of them still lack the call this summer to respond to growing demand.
Even precious, this aid does not, however, solve the substantive problem: the structural lack of labor in agriculture. “We always have more to do and always fewer people. It’s unfortunate, ”deplores Julie. Her husband Julien underlines another difficulty: “Swiss is very rare. There is foreign workforce, which is not at all qualified. It’s up to us to adapt to the person […] That’s the big problem, ”he explains.
“A source of exhaustion”
The case of the Tena family is not isolated. Through Switzerland, many farms – small or large – are struggling to recruit. The reasons are multiple: wages deemed unattractive, demanding hours, sometimes summary accommodation. So many conditions that slow down vocations, even among foreign workers.
Jean-Pierre Valiant, director of Terremploi, is a witness to this reality every day. Its organization’s mission is to support farmers in their search for staff. “For some of them, the absence of labor becomes a daily brake and above all, sometimes, a source of exhaustion or abandonment. This is a major issue, because we can no longer allow ourselves to ignore that there is a human distress behind it, ”he points out.
However, he recalls that operators also have their share of responsibility. “They also have a role to play in making their exploitation more attractive and perpetuating these jobs. The operators are still independents, ”he notes.
For the director of Terremploi, the problem is multifactorial. “I think the job suffers from a real deficit in attractiveness. We have often very demanding hours, physical work, and wages not always up to the commitment requested. We see that in certain border areas, potential candidates today prefer to turn to other sectors such as industry, or to other countries where working conditions are perceived as more favorable, ”he concludes.
