Should we do more to keep kids safe on farms?
The Harvest is a 2010 documentary that raised concerns about safety standards for young farm workers
Over the last week, four North Country news organizations — including NCPR — have wrestled with the issue of farm worker safety, reporting on new rules designed to protect teenagers who work on farms.
Most of those reports, in the Watertown Daily Times, the Adirondack Daily Enterprise and the Glens Falls Post Star gave the lion’s share of attention to critics of the proposed Federal regulations.
Farmers, industry groups and Rep. Bill Owens generally describe the rules as a case of bureaucratic overreach, with the New York Farm Bureau accusing the Department of Labor of telling farmers “how to raise our kids.”
In my reporting, I also found some credible and compelling sources who have a very different take on this issue.
John Myers, an expert on work safety at the Centers for Disease Control, told me that kids working on farms face risks of injury and fatality that are three times higher than in other industries.
Even though relatively few American kids work on farms these days, farm-work fatalities now account for the majority of work-related deaths for young people.
“When I compare them to other kids working in other places, the numbers [of injuries and deaths] are just so out of line…it’s just hard to ignore them,” Myers said.
Groups including Human Rights Watch and Farmworker Justice have embraced the new rules, arguing that many large-scale modern farms are more like factories.
It’s also noteworthy that last month the non-partisan political fact-checking organization Politifact reviewed fears about bureaucratic overreach raised by the ag industry and members of Congress and concluded that they are “mostly false.”
“The proposed rules are aimed at protecting children involved in agribusiness, not at children learning farming from their flannel-clad dads,” Politifact found. “We find the orchestrated criticism misleading…”
So what do you think? Is this an industry trying to preserve child labor standards that were abolished in other risky workplaces decades ago? Is it a traditional way of life threatened by “clueless” bureaucrats?
Tags: agriculture, economy, politics, worker safety
Sorry, plural “surroundings”.
Walker’s comment is why I try to keep my own counsel rather than comment. I was raised in foster care, married at 16. if you knew the years of embarrassment over my clothes, my children’s clothes, using food stamps, my car, my lack of education… it has taken years of thinking to be ok with the way i raised the kids on the farm… that it wasn’t damaging to them- that i don’t have to feel the weight of guilt. However, if you choose to see that in what I’ve written, ok- but it underscores for me again why I can’t comment in this blog. I will be another reader who has learned their lesson- hopefully for good this time.
My reaction is probably outsize because I have felt like the way we raised the kids was so inadequate, as far as vacations, etc. I have had to learn to see the positive. If I sound self-righteous, it was not intended. I just feel there are valuable lessons to be learned from familes working together, from kids being included- My experience is with a family farm, that’s all- I was raised on a farm, until my family died, so it’s my experience too. If I’d been raised on a lobster boat or a family restaurant, or my parents had been tatoo artists, I’d have a different perspective.
Kids working on farms in rural areas are exposed to certain dangers. Through instruction from parents and others and personal experience a young person learns how to live with the dangers of his/her particular environment.
Kids who live in a big city are taught, and learn by experience, to deal with the dangers inherent in their environment as well. While some farm kids, because of the economic stresses on their families, are required to work on the farm in order that the farm makes a living for the family; city kids are required by their families’ livelihoods to be out and about in dangerous places. The world is a dangerous place. Depending on where people live and how they make a living the dangers are different. Has anyone compared the quality of life for urban and rural kids as well as the injury and death rates in those two environments?
Maybe you are not trying to do that here but given the context of the discussion you must think there is some connection.
When I have had an owner of a construction company, a supervisor at a major food service company, and a manager of a grocery chain tell me that many, many young people they have employed do not have a good work ethic compared to my kids, well, yeah … there is a connection.
Hey Jill, don’t take any comments too personally. Your point of view is valuable here .
Does anyone remember Earl Butz? It wasn’t the liberals who killed the Family Farm, it was Earl “get big or get out” Butz.
The need for new laws pertaining to farm labor points straight as an arrow back to Earl. Liberals are now the great hope for small family farms of the future with the New Back to the Land movement and the desire of young educated professionals to have better, fresher, local foods.
Thank you Liberals for trying to save the Family Farm and a way of life.
Jill, you are to be commended. You are proof of the strength and maturity that can come from enduring less than desirable conditions and/or what is not status quo. No victim mentality for you!
I share in some of your experiences and have also learned to see the positive out of necessity. It makes a strong woman and from what you’ve written, your life has produced a depth of character that is rare these days.
Knuck, you don’t think these rules might put larger mechanized farms at an unfair disadvantage? Many of the the folks speaking out against it are the farms you want to see endure right? Smaller farms perhaps ones like Kathy’s and Jill’s.
“Thank you Liberals for trying to save the Family Farm and a way of life.”
I bet that you won’t find too many small farmers that fall into that mold? Some for sure but a majority? I doubt it.
Paul, I don’t know anything about Kathy or Jill’s farms but I do know thousands of families have been forced out of farming by the Butz policies.
As with any new legislation there are probably some tweaks to be made but let me reiterate that family members are not affected by these laws as far as I have heard.
Jill, I’m sorry, my comment was really a reaction to Kathy’s “I’m still “at it” since I also homeschool. This is the kind of family and society that shined for decades and even centuries before we got “so smart”.”
Besides, Kathy has more than once made a point of saying she was not easily offended.
I would urge you not to be driven away by my callousness. I’ll try for a lighter touch!
Paul, I think small farmers need to broaden their outlook if they want to survive as farmers.
I’m not from a farm family but we did own between 4 and 9 horses at different times along with up to 50 or so chickens some ducks, dogs and cats. We had a garden and cut firewood. We put up hay and mucked stalls. I went to school with farm kids, mostly dairy farmers but a few others as well along with some dude ranch types.
I worked on and around dairy farms over 30 years ago all over Vermont, NY Champlain Valley and Washington County doing refrigeration and dairy equipment work. Back then there were still quite a few farms with 30-50 milkers. A good sized farm had about 100 milkers and a really large farm had 200. Most but not all farms were using milk lines, a few were still using buckets and fewer yet had milking parlors and I helped install quite a few of those. The price of milk was around $14 a hundred weight — still is.
In a very short time, maybe a decade, lots of those small farms were gone. I don’t know what the number is but I’d bet there are only about a third of the farms today in that area than 30 years ago. Maybe less.
But there is growth in small farms just recently. I see a few new back to the land types, quite a few “gentleman farmers” who have moved out of urban areas and can rely on other income from investments or writing books. A few of the locals who got out of dairy switched to vegetables or value added products like specialty cheeses.
If you go back you will see that I said that we need to pay more for food. When I go to the farmers market I see a high percentage of LIBERALS paying more for fresh local food. They are doing this because they want a better product, they want to know the people who are growing their food, and they want to support local farm families.
New rules to protecting child workers is aimed squarely at what conservatives hate – immigrant labor. Ask yourself, when did local farms (excepting orchards) ever need all that much outside labor? How much of that workforce was under 18 and not a family member?
What farms are out there that are using a large labor pool of teen workers?
It seems to me all this anger is mis-directed. I think there is a deeper rooted problem in farming and I think that the Republican party has caused it through policies that favor corporate farming, hedge fund take-over of farms, industrial scale livestock farms and the like.
Wake up.
I only comment on things that affect me deeply. Seems like hubris to think I have to express my opinion on a daily basis. The problem is, if I comment, I do it becasue I’ve experienced something personally- the only way I believe a true, deep understanding comes from. Then I take the comments personally. So it’s not a good mix for me. My ancesters were British loyalists- so I’m not for conflict… better for me to think and not speak.
the above post was to have gone in the comment section of the Inbox- asking what we think of the comment section.
I don’t think it’s a welcoming place- people are snippy, and I would prefer it to be more gentle and allow people without as much confidence to join in. However, I still read it as part of my news info.
“When I go to the farmers market I see a high percentage of LIBERALS paying more for fresh local food.”
Go to a specialty cafe near Wall Street and you will see the same thing, probably mostly ‘conservative’ customers. I don’t think we should bother putting people into these compartments when it comes to buying food. That seems kind of ridiculous. We buy local grass fed beef and (things from the farmers market here because they are GOOD not because my wife is a liberal (she is) and you know where I stand.
But on your other point about the political views of folks that live in agricultural areas, many dominated by small farms, my guess is that you will see that they are not very BLUE places. I think the statistics probably back that up.
Yeah Paul, I used to think that way too. I voted for Ronald Reagan once. Then I realized that the things people said were Republican ideals didn’t match with the reality of what was happening in the Republican Party. I think you can see that happening more and more even up here in Red country.
I will grant you than urban liberals have a poor understanding of rural issues, but while I think they are sometimes wrong on certain issues I believe they are more on the side of working people than the Republican party is.
By the way, all the older generations of my family are solid Republicans. Everyone my generation and younger (and that is getting to be almost the whole family) have begun to support Democrats.
How do we protect kids when they cross a busy street, aren’t there more kids killed every day being hit by cars. Why do people have to create problems where there are none?