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Posted on 04/25/2012 6:26:12 AM PDT by No One Special
A proposal from the Obama administration to prevent children from doing farm chores has drawn plenty of criticism from rural-district members of Congress. But now it’s attracting barbs from farm kids themselves.
The Department of Labor is poised to put the finishing touches on a rule that would apply child-labor laws to children working on family farms, prohibiting them from performing a list of jobs on their own families’ land.
Under the rules, children under 18 could no longer work “in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials.”
“Prohibited places of employment,” a Department press release read, “would include country grain elevators, grain bins, silos, feed lots, stockyards, livestock exchanges and livestock auctions.”
The new regulations, first proposed August 31 by Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, would also revoke the government’s approval of safety training and certification taught by independent groups like 4-H and FFA , replacing them instead with a 90-hour federal government training course.
Rossie Blinson, a 21-year-old college student from Buis Creek, N.C., told The Daily Caller that the federal government’s plan will do far more harm than good.
“The main concern I have is that it would prevent kids from doing 4-H and FFA projects if they’re not at their parents’ house,” said Blinson.
“I started showing sheep when I was four years old. I started with cattle around 8. It’s been very important. I learned a lot of responsibility being a farm kid.”
In Kansas, Cherokee County Farm Bureau president Jeff Clark was out in the field — literally on a tractor — when TheDC reached him. He said if Solis’s regulations are implemented, farming families’ labor losses from their children will only be part of the problem.
“What would be more of a blow,” he said, “is not teaching our kids the values of working on a farm.”
The Environmental Protection Agency reports that the average age of the American farmer is now over 50 .
“Losing that work-ethic — it’s so hard to pick this up later in life,” Clark said. “There’s other ways to learn how to farm, but it’s so hard. You can learn so much more working on the farm when you’re 12, 13, 14 years old.”
John Weber, 19, understands this. The Minneapolis native grew up in suburbia and learned the livestock business working summers on his relatives’ farm.
He’s now a college Agriculture major.
“I started working on my grandparent’s and uncle’s farms for a couple of weeks in the summer when I was 12,” Weber told TheDC. “I started spending full summers there when I was 13.”
“The work ethic is a huge part of it. It gave me a lot of direction and opportunity in my life. If they do this it will prevent a lot of interest in agriculture. It’s harder to get a 16 year-old interested in farming than a 12 year old.”
Weber is also a small businessman. In high school, he said, he took out a loan and bought a few steers to raise for income. “Under these regulations,” he explained, “I wouldn’t be allowed to do that.”
In February the Labor Department seemingly backed away from what many had called an unrealistic reach into farmers’ families, reopening the public comment period on a section of the regulations designed to give parents an exemption for their own children.
But U.S. farmers’ largest trade group is unimpressed.
“American Farm Bureau does not view that as a victory,” said Kristi Boswell, a labor specialist with the American Farm Bureau Federation. “It’s a misconception that they have backed off on the parental exemption.”
Boswell chafed at the government’s rationale for bringing farms strictly into line with child-labor laws.
“They have said the number of injuries are higher for children than in non-ag industries,” she said. But everyone in agriculture, Boswell insisted, “makes sure youth work in tasks that are age-appropriate.”
The safety training requirements strike many in agriculture as particularly strange, given an injury rate among young people that is already falling rapidly.
According to a United States Department of Agriculture study , farm accidents among youth fell nearly 40 percent between 2001 and 2009, to 7.2 injuries per 1,000 farms.
Clark said the regulations are vague and meddlesome.
“It’s so far-reaching,” he exclaimed, “kids would be prohibited from working on anything ‘power take-off’ driven, and anything with a work-height over six feet — which would include the tractor I’m on now.”
The way the regulations are currently written, he added, would prohibit children under 16 from using battery powered screwdrivers, since their motors, like those of a tractor, are defined as “power take-off driven.”
And jobs that could “inflict pain on an animal” would also be off-limits for kids. But “inflicting pain,” Clark explained, is left undefined: If it included something like putting a halter on a steer, 4-H and FFA animal shows would be a thing of the past.
In a letter to The Department of Labor in December, Montana Republican Rep. Denny Rehberg complained that the animal provision would also mean young people couldn’t “see veterinary medicine in practice … including a veterinarian’s own children accompanying him or her to a farm or ranch.”
Boswell told TheDC that the new farming regulations could go into effect as early as August. She claimed farmers could soon find The Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division inspectors on their land, citing them for violations.
“In the last three years that division has grown 30 to 40 percent,” Boswell said. Some Farm Bureau members, she added, have had inspectors on their land checking on conditions for migrant workers, only to be cited for allowing their own children to perform chores that the Labor Department didn’t think were age-appropriate.
It’s something Kansas Republican Senator Jerry Moran believes simply shouldn’t happen.
During a March 14 hearing, Moran blasted Hilda Solis for getting between rural parents and their children.
“The consequences of the things that you put in your regulations lack common sense,” Moran said.
“And in my view, if the federal government can regulate the kind of relationship between parents and their children on their own family’s farm, there is almost nothing off-limits in which we see the federal government intruding in a way of life.”
The Department of Labor did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Podcast on this topic from a great speaker, biblical worldview:
http://generationswithvision.com/broadcast/obama-administration-threatening-family-farms/
How are they going to enforce this..
I for one would ignore it!
“I don’t know nor can I conceive of any farm or ranch families that will take this seriously.”
They’ll START taking such things “seriously” when Department of Agriculture SWAT teams show up on their properties...
And no, I’m NOT kidding.
Remember that Amish farmer that had a team of agents swoop down on him .... for selling raw milk?
“The sooner a child is introduced to it, the better...even if they’re only pushing a Lil’ Tykes red plastic mower around the yard while Dad is cutting the grass.”
Funny you mention this.
Wait until the Department of Labor issues regulations that ban kids under 18 from operating lawnmowers, “for their own protection”, of course...
When I was 13 I was driving the family tractor. These people are power hungry, destructive, nuts.
“If they pass enough stupid, intrusive, nonsensical laws they will ultimately be able to control all of us, as we will all unwittingly become criminals. It will then be up to the government to decide what laws they will enforce and which people they will prosecute. If you get out of line, they will find a law you have broken and get at you in that way.”
This has been posted before, but worth reading again:
“There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them...you create a nation of lawbreakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system, Mr. Rearden.”
Ayn Rand, “Atlas Shrugged”
I remember reading where the Russians would station soldiers at farms to prevent harvesting. The Democrat/Communist are well on their way to do the same thing. Control the food and energy, control the people.
LIBERals are LIBERTY Killers. Stop using the soft and fuzzy word LIBERal and call them communists or leftists.
Am no political campaign smarty, but it sure seems like the dems are rushing to do lots of things that will gen up votes to throw them out. Reverse psychology doesn't look appropriate here. They must really be having a tussel getting their lib vote out to resort to tossing them these marxist bones.
As the “technology trap” closes tighter and tighter on us, we are truly going to be screwed because soon there will be few people who will actually know how to cope with the SHTF. Society will breakdown in a matter of hours.
The next law will be to make farm kids totally useless to themselves and others... with the ideal happening when they wear their pants halfway down their butts, have gold teeth and flash mob 7/11 ‘s. Yeah, let’s go with the ‘winnahs’....
They already do surprise inspections of CRP land. Any complaint and they tell you that you signed a contract and can only get out of it by paying back all the monies received to date. Most farmers participate in some sort of government program. All of these are contractual. They will use this to justify snooping on your land.
Also, kids talk. Someone will find out and there are nannies in every community. You would be lucky to only have to answer for child labor laws. In some instances, they could sic the CPS folks on a family.
Don’t forget the new use of drones to spy on Americans. You ignore them at your peril. There are fines and they can just take money out of your accounts or put liens on your property.
This is so destructive. Back in the day, kids out here earned their spending money/shoe money/college money tasseling corn, walking bean fields to spot the rouges, and even working in tobacco farming, which includes some dangerous jobs. Every Spring, entire families would go out to the pastures to pull mustard before the dairy cows could eat it. This was actually a bonding activity, where all generations joined in, followed by a family picnic or BBQ.
I agree that it is anti-family, anti-work ethic and aimed at decreasing the number of generational farmers.
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