Rural kids, parents angry about Labor Dept. rule banning farm chores

[Dave]

One of the stupidest things I've heard in awhile coming from the administration. I swear they don't think things through.. I mean if you can let your kids do chores on the family farm then that means the owners have to hire help which in turn is going to up the cost on a variety of items. Obviously who ever thought this up was repeatedly dropped on their head.

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 be finalized 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.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/04/25/rural-kids-parents-angry-about-la...

[XLFD]

Say goodbye to the family farm if this boneheaded rules go through.  Departments of the executive branch need to be slapped down when they try to stretch their power in quasi-legislative actions like this.  This is what has led to millions of dollars wasted in deciding what to do with the SS Badger and its problems with the EPA, and what has transpired against certain hog-farmers by the MI DNR.  Vote for legislators that won't put up with this, or become one yourself.

[Sweater Cows!]

The goal is to get rid of the family farm, Monsanto and their ilk of giant AG business want to own the world food supply and patent all crops and animals (see the Pigs Farm story on this forum).

 

Then they will turn the parents who 'allow' their children to learn about farming into felons and take away their gun rights as well.

 

It's all a scam.

[AQUAMAN]

You would think Obama would delay this type of legislation until after the election. Instead, he's coming up with more intrusions into the family and individual rights. I've heard others mention Monsanto and other monopoly type AG businesses pushing this type of rulings. Maybe they want to close up the American farmer, and replace him with the foreign farmers, and their inferior crops. Isn't that what Obama has been about afterall, keep Americans down, and promote the foreign imports. The more unemployment, the better, the more needy for social services to have under their control. Sad days in history upon us for sure, and not getting any better, day after long day until this Bozo is out of the White House.

[Lisa O'Brien]

Is there any area of our life that the government doesn't want some control over, wow this is ridiculous. 

[easymoney]

This is what collectionism is. Everything for the party

Amazing how quickly democracy can disapear.

 

 

[Dave]

Its like the people that come up with these silly ideas have no concept of how farms work or history for that matter. If it wasn't for family farms, its quite likely the America we are in right now would be much different... and maybe not even an America at all.... we might all have a British accent and be having tea and crumpets. Farms have our backbone... to even propose what's been proposed is really just a slap in the face!

[AQUAMAN]

I talked to the marina manager here last night and mentioned this atrocity on the horizon, this guy also grew up on the folk's farm and was disgusted to say the least. He agreed it gave him the "work ethic" he's learned since a child and stuck with him all his life. If Obama truly wants to alienate the farmers, women, legal aliens, and the rest of the general population on many other legislation like energy and foreign relations, he sure is doing a great job of it. I just don't see how anyone in the D party doesn't stand up against him and run for the office, it's incredible. I also can't see how any polls can have him a dead heat against any other candidate, his actions and words these days are NOT what any reasonable American wants to see and hear from our leader, esp. in this dire straights financial crisis that seems to be getting worse instead of better.

[easymoney]

check out the video

http://freemarketamerica.org/if-I-wanted america to fail/

[Lisa O'Brien]

It's not up to the government to tell parents what chores/jobs their kids are allowed to perform. Whats next kids can't mow grass it they are under 17, no housework for children on school nights. Government does not need to be involved in every aspect of our lives - rant over

[Willy]

It still boggles the mind to think that over half of the country still would vote for Obama. Who the hell are these people who so eagerly are willing to have a massive liberty restricting Government? This Country's core attitude is definitely changing. I caught part of the Obama appearance on Jimmy Fallons show and it was enough to make you puke the way this sitting President is acting. He stands there and is takes part in this childish act which included the slamming of Tim Tebow. We are in big trouble if he gets reelected. 

[Lisa O'Brien]

Agreed - poor judgement.