Could this be happening in America?
Excerpts from Feds to ban children from farm chores
By Patrick Richardson, Daily Caller, April 25, 2012
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Could this be happening in America? |
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Excerpts from Feds to ban children from farm chores By Patrick Richardson, Daily Caller, April 25, 2012 |
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[The excerpts below alert us to an unthinkable threat to American families across the country -- especially farmers. Pray that farms and families remain free from these atrocious regulations. :
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....“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.... 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.”...
John Weber, 19, understands this. The Minneapolis native grew up in suburbia and learned the livestock business working summers on his relatives’ farm....“I started working on my grandparent’s and uncle’s farms for a couple of weeks in the summer when I was 12....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.”...
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....
The way the regulations are currently written, he added, would prohibit children under 16 from using battery powered screwdrivers...
...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.”
...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.