by J. Lawrenz Decano

My father moved to Canada almost twenty years ago as a temporary foreign worker (TFW). Nearing the end of his employment contract, the animal shelter who recruited him and other Filipino migrant workers refused to offer them support to become permanent residents despite initial promises of doing so. With the looming threat of falling out of status and his determination to realize his dreams for our family, he and many others looked at the agricultural sector for new work permits. He became an agricultural labourer who cared for swine livestock where the smell served as an inescapable reminder of his precarious circumstances rooted in and created by his temporary legal status and ambiguous employment contract. Inspired by my father’s sobering lived experience as a livestock carer, my master’s research engages with the cattle feedlot industry in southern Alberta and seeks to gain a better understanding of the lived experiences of immigrant and migrant workers shaped by the Canadian immigration system and feedlot working conditions.

Feedlots are land operations dedicated to the feeding, “fattening” or finishing of cattle livestock prior to slaughter. These feeding operations are important, as feedlots sustains the beef commodity chain located in southern Alberta where just over two-thirds or 70% of the beef sold in Canada are manufactured (Bragg, 2021). The cattle and ranching industry (including feedlots) have relied and continuously rely on the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) with a 50% increase in TFW presence across Canadian farms from 2017 to 2025 (StatCan, 2026). TFWs and individuals who have legally transitioned out of temporary status but remains employed in feedlot work are not disaggregated from this data set contributing to the sustained opaqueness of this industry. Despite their labour-intensive role in ensuring beef is on the dinner tables of Canadian and beef-export-receiving homes, TFWs and immigrant workers in Canadian cattle feeding operations remain largely overlooked and absent in Canadian labour studies, migration, and geographical scholarship. This knowledge gap limits scholarly capacities to understand the precarity and dangers of feedlot work, why this type of work is pursued and retained, and ways the feedlots’ location in rural and small centre areas shape workers lived experiences. My master’s research seeks to address these scholarly gaps and shed transparency on this opaque industry through semi-structured interviews with immigrant and migrant feedlot workers and the chronicling of their stories.

I focus on the rural as a distinct geographical space in which immigrant and migrant cattle workers lived experiences unfold. The rural is othered and discursively regarded as “an obsolescent category (a historical starting point) or residual space (an unconsumed world)” (Gillen et al., 2022, p. 187). I aim to contribute to the urban-rural scholarship by critically challenging the reductive depictions and descriptions of the rural, focusing instead on the theory and process of ruralization. Ruralization, according to Monika Krause (2013), “has no center” (p. 239) in that it is not tethered to a core – a contrast to how urbanization has been imagined and theorized in scholarship to spatially and socially radiate outwards from a city. Krause (2013) argues that ruralization is found in both rural and urban spaces and is exemplified by “the persistence of informal social relations, the natural, the problem of food and livelihoods, basic need, and complex dependencies that nevertheless enable survival” (p. 243). Building on Krause (2013), this master’s research seeks to understand how processes and practices of immigrant and migrant settlement and labour undergo ruralization through the Canadian migrant agricultural workers program and feedlot work.

Existing scholarship regarding agricultural and agri-food immigrant and migrant workers in Canada are largely characterized by workers’ precarious legal status (Goldring et al., 2009; Tungohan, 2018) and abhorrent workplace conditions (Bragg, 2021; Bragg and Hyndman, 2022; Cohen, 2019; Grez, 2022; Ramsaroop, 2023; Vosko and Spring, 2022). My interest lies in understanding how temporary legal status and workplace conditions in southern Alberta feedlots contributes to multidimensional precarity experienced by immigrant and migrant workers, building on Strauss’ (2020) argument to critically consider precarity in its “multi-dimensional, relational form” (p.1219). I mobilize multidimensional precarity to also include the many ways immigrant and migrant bodies are exhausted and exploited to maintain chains of production and consumption. As exemplified by the stories of the feedlot workers I interviewed, precarity is also frostbites, sleeplessness, cuts, bruises, and other bodily harms.  

I am currently in the process of writing, and I offer this vignette and preliminary analysis as a glimpse of the work to come. The sun was winding down when I found myself following a car in a small Albertan town about fifteen minutes away from the Coutts-Sweet Grass border crossing. A father and son were guiding me to another potential participant’s home after their own interview had finished. I was introduced to Brian (pseudonym), and my arrival just ended his nap – a disruption I profusely apologized for. Brian is a father of three from Benguet, Philippines who arrived in Canada on March 2023. His inability to practice in fields related to computer science, a degree he attained in the Philippines, is caused by the active deskilling he experiences as a migrant in Canada. He and another worker are employed at a smaller feedlot caring for around 800 steers and are paid a base-wage of 20.00 CAD per hour. Instead of a regular 9 to 5, 5 days-a-week schedule, he works up to 15 hours a day, 6 days a week. These strenuous working hours affords him and his wife, who is working as a motel receptionist on an open work permit, to pay for the expenses accrued by their immigration and support their day to day life. I asked him, “what’s the riskiest thing about your job?”, and he replied, “one time I still had to work when it was -40º C” (Interview with Brian, October 19, 2025). Brian comes from the Cordilleras, which is a mountain range in the Philippines known for its cool climate compared to the valley and seaside regions. Yet, the cold he encountered in Alberta was different. Southern Alberta experienced a deep freeze where temperatures dropped well beyond -30º C, with winds fluctuating around 20 km/h in January of 2024 (Weather Spark, 2026).

As some of the workers I interviewed humorously reminded me, you cannot tell the cows to take care of themselves because you decided to go on vacation or it is too cold to go to work. After all, the feedlot industry is a 24-hour business which constantly need workers, whether it be the entire crew or a single night staff, to always man processing and caring operations. The need to continue feedlot operations 24 hours a day despite freezing temperatures further entrenches migrant workers in multidimensional precarities where vulnerabilities rooted in and created by temporary legal status and employment contracts collide with the tropical body’s reaction to the cold and exhaustion. Brian’s story is part of a larger narrative which show how labour migration and climate precarities manifests in the everyday. I see it through his sleeping schedule and the limited time he could spend with his family. He articulated it through his facial expressions while sharing his experience during the January 2024 freeze as if in disbelief he managed to work through such weather conditions at all. When I asked why he is willing to do this type of work despite its hardships, Brian responded, “I’d rather work anywhere but the Philippines” (Interview with Brian, October 19, 2025). His response is reflective of Philippines’ colonial legacies and the nation’s structural and systemic issues which has caused continuous struggle and poverty in the everyday lives of majority of Filipinos. These harsh material realities are embodied and are carried across national borders, shaping the decision making of migrant and immigrant workers even in isolated, rural Canadian feedlots. The first frame of reference to Brian’s struggle is his lived experience in the Philippines coming from a family of vegetable farmers. The vegetable market is notoriously dependent on the weather as well as external forces exemplified by the current global fuel crisis which has decimated vegetable prices in the Philippines (Fokno, 2026). To Brian, struggling in Canada holds more value than struggling in the Philippines which is particularly important in how he makes sense of the precarities he is willing to endure as a migrant feedlot worker. This does negate the fact that, at the end of day, he is subjected to exploitation.

Despite these precarities, Brian allows for the possibility that his dreams pose more resistance to the difficulties he faces as a migrant worker. As Brian stated in Ilocano when asked what his dreams are, “Nga makaeskwela da, adyay ti number one” which translates to English as, “for my kids to be able to go to school, that is the number one” (Interview with Brian, October 19, 2025). His dream for his kids is telling of a future he has fashioned for his family that is anchored in the promise of Canada; Canada being the place where these dreams are meant to come to fruition. Being critical of the “Canadian dream” as a state construct and a tool of discipline is needed and warrants attention, however, we cannot ignore that a version of the Canadian dream is tended to and upheld by immigrants and migrants in Canada. To Brian and many other feedlot workers who shared their stories, this unapologetically romantic Canadian dream is what pulls them to move forward through the bodily, material and emotional harms they experience as labour migrants. This place-specific dream warms the chill air, soothes weary bodies and is made equivalent to a good night’s sleep.

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J. Lawrenz Decano is one-point-five generation Filipino immigrant from Alberta and a student in the MA Human Geography Program in the Department of Geography at York University. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Urban and Regional Studies with a minor in Anthropology from the University of Lethbridge (’24). His master’s research was granted the Canadian Graduate Students – Masters Scholarship from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council. In December 2025, he presented his master’s research at the International Geographical Union – Commission on the Sustainability of Rural Systems Colloquium held at the University of the Philippines – Diliman Campus which was attended by his supervisor, Dr. Jennifer Hyndman, as well as fellow geographers from different places.

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