Thursday, April 26, 2012

The War on the Family Farmer

My wife and her sisters grew up on the family dairy farm. Daily they helped their dad with the chores. Baling hay, planting corn, milking cows, killing and cleaning chickens, mending fence, spearing barn rats with pitchforks, playing tagon the barn roof and hide and seek in the silo. She's been kicked in the head to concussion by cows and zapped senseless by electric fence.

Which may explain alot. . .

But she also understands and is unafraid of hard physical work better than nearly any other person I know.

Certainly better than the moron and moocher in 1600 Pennsylvania. Neither of whom have ever raised a callous on their hands in their life.

Kids have been working on the American family farm and homestead since before America was America. In many cases it has been the difference between the success or failure of the family farm. Between eating and not.

UPDATE: Uncle Barry sez nevermind.


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

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.”

8 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Midnight.
I've been reading about the story a while, and i can't come up with another solution to why these laws now.
Monsanto wants to eliminate the small farmers , cattle ranchers all together, what better way to make it for them so much more expensive to farm, by taking away their 'family structure'.
Every law is aimed at preventing the individual to farm , store seeds or have farm animals.
Now they're even culling 'invasive' pig species.

Pastorius said...

As I recall, Will has been sending us this story for over a year.

midnight rider said...

This is certainly not a new story but it has come p again so I thought I'd post it. I think I posted something similar quite awhile ago.

Will's right, hat vetter way for the big farmglomerates to increase their own profits than by driving the family farmer out of business.

My wife has started a garden out back that gets bigger every year. She wants to sell at the local farmer's market in the fall. Which will no doubt prompt a visit from the FDA goons to shut us down.

Maybe Ed Abbey was right all those years ago. As bad as things have become agrarian anarchy looks better and better :)

midnight rider said...

hat vetter = what better

not enough Wild Turkey yet

sheesh

Anonymous said...

My husband farmed for most of his life in La. until 5 years of drought put him out of farming. He grew cotton, wheat, soybeans, & raised beef cattle. He has 3 sons all of whom started working on the different farms he had at about the age of 11. They drove big tractors, grain trucks (not on the public roads), grain buggies, cotton pickers, etc., etc., & were damn good at it. As a result a work ethic was instilled in all 3of them. They worked the same hours as the rest of the men when not in school or doing schoolwork, & were paid for it. Thus, a work ethic was instilled in all 3.

It sounds like our 'government' wants to get kids off the farms so they can bring in more Mexicans, legal or illegal, just to get them in the country so they can vote the Democratic Kool-Aid ticket. Also, they want to wind up with just the big Ag business farms, one size fits all with no competition. This Socialist/union-loving/czar-appointing 'President' will do anything he can to drive this country over the cliff.

Silverlady

Epaminondas said...

Every year in Maine after school starts, when the potato harvest is set, the schools of Aroostook County shut down for 2 weeks so all the children can help their families get the harvest in so they can all NOT DIE THAT WINTER

Blue said...

I shoveled an awful lot of pig and cow shit when I was a kid. Baled a lot of hay, shelled a lot of corn. Assisted cows in birthing calves and sows birthing piglets.

I turned out OK :)

These idiots can take a flying f*ck at a rolling donut.

Epaminondas said...

They have DROPPED the effort