That's a very good question and we talk a lot about it.
In my view the solution is probably a three-pronged approach for maintaining an available workforce for the industry of the future. One is to attract and retain to the degree that we can the existing workforce in the local communities in which we operate. Additional work is needed there. The challenge is that we have a structural problem in our seafood industry in that many of our fisheries are highly seasonal. It's very difficult to attract labour into a 12-, 14-, or 16-week fishery with relatively low wages, generally speaking. No young people are going to choose that as a career option when they have other options. There's an opportunity cost associated with that, but there's work to be done to extend seasons and to extend operations.
I'm just back from Iceland. I visited a plant in Reykjavik. It's a modern processing operation run by HB Grandi where 80% of the workforce in that operation are what would be considered former immigrants; that is, they would be Filipinos. In some cases they are second generation and in some cases third generation, where you have mothers and daughters or fathers and sons and siblings working together. That's a year-round operation. They work Monday to Friday with eight-hour shifts and great lifestyles. The minimum salary there, if you take it on an annual basis—I think the cost of living in Iceland is much higher than it would be here—is about $50,000. Even then, they have a significant foreign workforce, or formerly foreign workforce, and through immigration they've addressed it.
Here we need a three-pronged approach. We need to attract and retain to the degree that we can. We need to innovate and automate. Mark made the point earlier about feeding mechanisms and having a young student using something that would be comparable to gaming technology. We're doing work now in automation. We have three engineers in one of our research facilities, and we think there's room there through the automation of the industry to provide some really good, highly skilled employment opportunities that would attract people. That's number two.
Part of the solution is going to be an immigrant workforce. That's the reality. The challenge we have is that we don't have the value proposition in the seafood sector right now. For the most part, temporary foreign workers are the stopgap measure. In the long term we're probably going to need a model similar to what Iceland has and other jurisdictions like Norway, where they have longer operating seasons and they can attract a workforce in these operations that is able to become part of the communities and societies.