Read this! You kids will not be able to work on your farm anymore!!

[chickened]

The link offered the Department of Labor page, as well as others. I want to point out the original post came from a VERY political website, as well.
http://www.dol.gov/whd/media/press/whdpressVB3.asp?pressdoc=national/20120426.xml

If you'd rather believe the propaganda b.s. then by all means, be fooled. Read the bill, that is the only truth worth calling the truth. All else is political machinations. And sadly, pathetically, look how many people are falling for that crap. This is an election year people and the millionaires are moving the electorate to their will by buying air time, marketing their lies and putting out this kind of ridiculousness.

Maybe you've all been lucky enough that your children and families haven't lost a loved one to a farm accident. Lucky, lucky you. God bless your family and keep them safe. Not all of us have been so lucky. We lost a baby cousin riding on his grandfather's lap who fell under the blades of a plow when it bumped around a corner. He'd plowed with a baby on his knee a hundred times before, but this time, his arm wasn't as strong as it used to be. Christ forgive him, because those parents never will. Decades before, my great-uncle lost his arm when he was ten using a farming machine he really had no business using, but times were tough in the Depression and that's what families did - they put everyone to work. Ruined him for life. Standard family farm practices in the day and to this day. That's the sort of thing this bill was trying to do good work for.

This bill would not have made a difference unless the child was working. It is about employing youths.

Unless the BOLI laws now are reaching into family life on a farm.

 

[Matthew3590]

These laws do not protect us from ourselves. There will always be deaths in job industry and the numbers of kids killed do not support this legislation.

 

[chickened]

The real problem.

 

[cupman]

Did chickened just complain about a news source being biased?

 

[they'reHISchickens]

As a former farm kid and the mom of 5 who all worked on neighboring farms in their teens, this does not help a much much larger problem:
Farmers, like everyone else, are having smaller families. Unless you are Mennonite or Amish in this area, farmers are having 2 or 3 kids, not the 5 and more of the last generation. Only a small percentage of these kids are staying in farming. So, you not only have a smaller percentage of family farms these days, you have a smaller pool of potential farmers. Where in heaven's name are we going to get our future agriculturalists?
Penn State has a whole group of educators trying to teach beginning farmers. But it's darn hard learning the lifestyle from scratch as an adult. A lot of natural learning falls through the cracks. Yet in the name of 'protection' we want to limit the exposure of teens from this very necessary occupation?
Much of farming learning needs to become instinctive. The more one works with animals, the more you learn about them. There are laws on the books right now that prohibit those under 16 from caring for a cow with a newborn calf. Yeah, and what about the cow we had who would not let anyone but her 9 yr old 4H owner near her calf? By 14, that same 4H'er was delivering twins in the field...alone. How do you gain that knowledge and that sense of accomplishment without experience? How do you learn to read an animal's behavior other than by constant exposure to its behavior?
Yes,again, equipment is dangerous. So are cars on the road. We send our 16 yr olds on the super- highway with 6 months of instruction. How foolish! Let the kids be on the farm-- with supervision of course! Let them hear over and over--- careful with that machine-- over years instead of months. Let them drive slow vehicles before we let them on the highways.
I was lucky that our neighboring farms had fathers and grandfathers to oversee my kids-- as well as their own kids. If you let the children naturally assume duties as they grow instead of legislate them, it works for everyone.
Having said that, there is always the idiot like the farmer down the road who let his 6 yr old ride on the fender of the tractor and rode over him when the kid fell off. Two broken legs on the poor kid for months, and when he finally healed, what did I see? The kid on the tractor fender again. Can we spell stupid? Kids don't belong on moving tractor fenders, ever! But then, gee, we can't legislate against stupidity so why try?

 

[GardenerGal]

Excellent post, They'reHISChickens.
Nothing academic can ever replace hands-on experience absorbed every day, throughout one's formative years. Adults who "go back" to agriculture have to start from square one and there is so much nuance that they will miss. It's like comparing a complex, layered human brain's insights to a computer programmed with the basics. The latter simply can't match the former for richness of nuance insight born of experience and exposure.

The population from rural areas is increasingly gravitating toward cities and hired-jobs or non-ag trades. Who's left to grow the food? Big Corporate Agriculture. Small farms that remain, can't compete and get bought up as larger conglomerates.

Our county government was dissolved in the 1980s, and the county ag=tech highschool was turned over to the state. They are about to turn it into a big voc-tech school in which agriculture will play a much smaller role. Part of the reason is the fading away of our agrarian society and increasing urbanization here in northeastern Massachusetts. Fewer kids want to go into farming or can't afford to, and their family farms have been sold to developers - so they'd be starting from scratch. So, the kids who want ag end up becoming veterinarians or vet-techs, landscapers or arborists, and other trades that are tangentially connected to agriculture. Even so, we have a strong FFA chapter at the ag school. I hope it continues to survive after the "vpc-techization" of the school -- the voc-tech curriculum will be much bigger than the ag curriculum, and I'm praying they keep the dairy herd and Morgan horse breeding program, the poultry and the hort greenhouses.

My greatest hope is that the current move toward backyard poultry and small-livestock raising, home gardens, bee-keeping, woodlot management and other DIY homesteading skills will develop into a larger trend of self-sufficiency or at least more independence from Big Ag. More city and suburb people are eager to learn how to do small-scale agriculture, and it is spawning new cottage industries that could help make food -- not to mention heirloom seed and livestock/poultry breed conservation -- more localized and less in the control of big business. Maybe they don't have the experience of growing up on farms, but they are willing students and will learn by trial and error. Sometimes the wheel needs to be reinvented, but what the heck. It may be our best chance preserving the agrarian traditions we hold dear.

But only time will tell.

 

[FarmerJamie]

Any youth deaths are tragic losses, one is too many,

From the CDC regarding ag-related deaths: http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/childag/childagsurvproj.html

Between 1995 and 2000, there was an average of 116 deaths per year to youth less than 20 years old that occurred on US farms.
The rate of on-farm deaths was highest for youth 16-19 years old at 10.4 deaths per 100,000 farm youth. This was followed by youth less than 10 years old at 10.1 deaths per 100,000 farm youth, and youth 10-15 years old at 7.1 deaths per 100,000 farm youth.
The leading cause of death for youth less than 16 years old was machinery (137 deaths). For youth 16-19 years of age, the leading cause of death was suicide (41 deaths).
In comparison, consider deaths from swimming pools. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1470565/
Methods. We obtained data about drowning deaths in the United States (1995–1998) from death certificates, medical examiner reports, and newspaper clippings collected by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Results. During the study period, 678 US residents aged 5 to 24 years drowned in pools

By my calculation, that averages about 169 lives lost per year from swimming pools.

It's easy for the government to target sections of our economy that most people know little about personally or will ever experience. Could you imagine the outcry if a backyard swimming pool became illegal based on the injury statistics?

 

[Royd]

I am sorry but your above statement is not borne out by a careful reading of the law. In fact, the law specifically states that it does nothing to impede 4H. Show me specifically the section you are referring to before I can lend any credence to your interpretation.
To expand a bit in the hopes of putting all this nonsense to bed let me give some facts and not hysterical falsehoods:
1. A child can not only work on his parents farm without any restriction but also on the farm of any relative that acts in the place of the parent. That would include grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. All a parent has to do is give consent.
2. This regulation DOES NOT apply to any 4H participation in any of their activities regarding animals and that is so even if the animals are located on another persons farm.
3. There are exceptions for children who work as voluteers or students performing educational worlk for their own well being.
4. The regulation only prohibits children from operation heavy power driven equipment UNLESS they have completed a 90 hour safety course that is offered by any state or local educational authority. This course did not eliminate the 4H safety course..in fact, it is the 4H Safety course except that it now permits other agencies (schools, colleges) to offer the course so that it is more accessible to kids who want to operate the farm machinery. Once they take the course there is no restrictions on operating machinery.
Fried green eggs, I am sure that you meant well, but you did not get one issue correct. Please read the regulation and do not rely on other hysterical predictions of doom and gloom.

A 90 hour course, taught by who? A fat government bureacrat, who wouldn't know a PTO lever from a clutch pedal?
And 90 hours? That, in itself, is designed as a preventative measure from allowing kids to ever learn...It would probably be designed like remedial driving courses...You know, the ones where the state rips you off for a couple of hundred because you exceeded the speed limit. .....It would probably cost $1,000 or more...Another designed obstacle. Then, some adult must escort them to this class, which would mean 2 weeks of production down the drain.....How about a simple computer tutorial on any given piece of equipment, a sign off by the parents or guardian, and if anything goes wrong, then the state can get involved?

Let's be honest here. Child labor laws were never about preventing child slavery, or abuse...It was about, eventually, developing a dumbed down, lazyed out population, which recoils at the the thought of hard work, and demands that life's basic needs be given to them. Funny that that is exactly what we see in the OWS crowds, across the country.

 

[Royd]

Yeah "general welfare" is a good one.

Whose general welfare? NOT MINE! That much I can assure you...

The government is out of control. Although, I still stand by my previous assertion that regulating child labor is a good thing. I think that with as many ultra poor families that are out there, completely unregulated child labor would be a recipe for a lot of wasted lives. Now if the system hadn't been rigged to the advantage of the ultra rich around the time of the great depression (and even more so from the 70s to present) then I think a lot less regulation would be necessary, as families and individuals could make a choice regarding who they worked for and not be essentially forced (by poorness) into whatever work they could get.

Viva la revolution.

Wasted lives? You mean by destroying the most informative and energetic years of a child's life, when they could be learning real life lessons? Instead, we, now, have millions of kids who's only goal in life is to design computer games or become a world champion skate boarder. If all else fails, they can spend the rest of their lives, holding up a pair of pants, with one hand, smoking a cig with the other, and squinting into the sun, with their hats turned sideways, and become a bunch of gangbangers.

 

[FarmerJamie]

A 90 hour course, taught by who? A fat government bueacrat, who wouldn't know a PTO lever from a clutch pedal?
And 90 hours? That, in itself, is designed as a preventative measure from allowing kids to ever learn...It would probably be designed like remedial driving courses...You know, the ones where the state rips you off for a couple of hundred because you exceeded the speed limit. .....It would probably cost $1,000 or more...Another designed obstacle. Then, some adult must escort them to this class, which would mean 2 weeks of production down the drain.....How about a simple computer tutorial on any given piece of equipment, a sign off by the parents or guardian, and if anything goes wrong, then the state can get involved?

Let's be honest here. Child labor laws were never about preventing child slavery, or abuse...It was about, eventually, developing a dumbed down, lazyed out population, which recoils at the the thought of hard work, and demands that life's basic needs be given to them. Funny that that is exactly what we see in the OWS crowds, across the country.

Thanks, Royd (it's been a while, how are you doing?)... your comments about the workforce are right on and are echoed in "Lincphin - Are you Indispensable" by Seth Godin. And before the anti-business wing chimes in about the evil business 1%, the unions, and educational industry are willing partners in this downward spiral.