Thread: Goverment to eliminate 4H & FFA ????

Rural kids, parents angry about Labor Dept. rule banning farm chores
By Patrick Richardson | The Daily Caller – 11 hrs ago

A proposal from the Obama administration to prevent children from doing farm chores has drawn plenty of criticism from rural-district member 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 small 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.

http://news.yahoo.com/rural-kids-par...054605888.html

comments

By the time I was 16, I had over 50 head of cattle, completely independant from my father's operation. I was solely responsible for the health, breeding management and sale of them. I also solely reaped the rewards each year, when it was time to sale. I seperated them, loaded them into the cattle trailer and drove them 65 miles to the stockyard. I sold them. I dealt with the auction staff, made my own bids and paid for new stock to diversify and strengthen my herd. I was the one the cashier handed the check to at the end of the sale and I was the one who deposited that check into the bank account in my own name. The tragic outcome of all these "labor abuses?" I completed medical school with absolutely NO debt, no help from the government and no need to work for slave wages in some failing, backwater hospital in order for the goverment to pay off my student loans. I paid for it all with money I earned FARMING! And I did it all, because my parents taught me the value of honest, hard work WELL before the age of 16.

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We're the government - we know what's good for your children, not you. Is it any surprise that Secretary Solis hasn't worked anywhere other than government in her entire adult life? And my guess is that if you ask her where corn comes from, her answer would be "the supermarket."

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why has this generation completely rejected the values that built our nation?

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Wow, when I was a kid I use to make a boat load of money working on farms and other homes doing all sorts of odd jobs. This admin wants everything under their thumb. It is everything my wife ran out of HUngary to escape. The communist took her family land back in the day.

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Replacing 4H and FFA with a federal government training course. Really, so now we have idiots sitting in air conditioned historical buildings writing a training program for farms. That'll work well, just like so many other federal government programs. Can't wait to visit the local farms to buy produce and find the barns pasted with federally mandated employee rights/warning signs, written in 8 languages, with English being on the bottom.

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Keep it up and the only farms left will be those run by huge corporations. The only way you get kids interested in continuing the family farm is to have them involved on a daily basis in the farm work itself. Im getting pretty tired of the govt interfering with our lives. Next thing they will be removing children from homes and putting them in institutions to be raised by the state. Can anyone spell REVOLUTION?

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I couldn't wait until I was big enough to reach those pedals....
I was probably more proud of my very own tractor than my first car.

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I dare them to come to my house and tell me my kids cant collect eggs, clean the coop, harvest the corn or any chores they do for an allowance. What is next?" child abuse for making them clean their rooms? or prison time for daring to have a kid mow the lawn? Government has screwed up enough stuff..lets leave us alone!

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A little unknown fact about those who make these type of rules is that not one single one has ever worked or visited a family farm in their life time. The only thing they know about farms is from watching "Green Acres", since they all grew up in big cities where a tree is something makes a mess with falling leaves and the dogs use for relief. They are also the same ones who buy a house in the country across from a dairy farm because they want to get close to nature. Yet 3-5 years later they are complaining to the local boards of health and others, that the smells are keeping them from enjoying sitting outside with friends from the Big city, and they want the farmer to either move their holding pens, barns and manure piles someplace else or close the farm altogether.

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Watch--a year or so after this passes they'll come out and say, "...the farmers are going under because Americans won't do that work and we need migrant labor..." It's so sickeningly easy to see...

Originally Posted by SLance68

The first comment in your second post is very suspect. He would have had to have an adult as the person that opened that checking account. Minors can't have a checking they can have savings accounts not checking so he was lying about that part. I would suspect he was making up a lot of that post.

He did not say the checking account was soley in his name.

When I was a young teen, maybe 13 or 14, my Dad added me to their checking account and I "paid" all the bills for the household. My name was on the account, their funds.

A parent may have open the account for him, knowing it was "his" and only "his" to manage with no additions from them, and it had his name on it.

I'm not that suspect of his post. I worked from 12 years old and socked away all my money, rarely spent any.....until I got way older and took a nice trip to Europe and a few years later, purchased a coop with a nice down payment.

Originally Posted by SLance68

I had to reread the last part of your thread. I thought why did she buy a chicken coop? Took a minute to figure out it was a co-op or at least I hope it wasn't a chicken coop (yuck).

Let me tell you, that was an expensive chicken coop.

I had a checking account before I was 18. I didn't need an adult to open it... however, my mother had died and my father lived more than a thousand miles away. I abused it, so I wish they hadn't let me have it. I was not ready. Ppl also assume that a minor can't get food stamps on their own... but I did, I had no choice, I was literally on my own and wasn't of legal age to work any where when I first applied.

But, to the business of family farms. My grandparents own a cattle farm... I wanted to work w/ my grandfather terribly bad but since I did not have the correct "relieving yourself" equipment, my grandmother wouldn't let me go out in the fields with the boys... but ALL the boys in our family spent their weekends and summers working the farm w/ my grandfather and uncle. We all loved being on that farm, even those of us who were only allowed to go as far out as the hay barn, where we snuck around playing on the bales until we were caught and warned of snakes (even though none of us were bit). I think this is a very bad decision. Most of my friends did 4H and they wouldn't trade it for anything... a 90 hour training class? Stupid stupid stupid.