Agriculture officials fear new rules mandated by the U.S. Department of Labor will put an unnecessary cramp in the style of family farms.
Some of the rules would fundamentally change the way family farms have operated for 100 years, including prohibiting:
– youths under the age of 18 from being near certain animals without adult supervision,
– youths from participating in common livestock practices like vaccinating and hoof trimming,
– handling most animals more than six months old,
– operating certain farm machinery,
– completing tasks at elevations over six feet, and
– working at stockyards and grain and feed facilities.
Proposing the new rules in September 2011, the Labor Department cited safety concerns. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately three-fourths of work fatalities in self-employed jobs were in agriculture and more than half of the deaths in agriculture occurred in family businesses.
“The deaths of agricultural workers, both young and adult, occurred primarily in crop production and often involved motor vehicles,” the department stated when it announced the new rules. It noted that between 1992 and 2005, 1,412 workers on farms died from tractor overturns.
Critics say the new rules are an overreach by government into the lives of Americans.
During a stop in Iola Wednesday, U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran called the rules a “terrible intrusion” and said if the government can regulate relationships between parents and their children, “there is virtually nothing off limits when it comes to government intrusion into our lives.”
“Certainly, no one wants young people working on farms in unsafe conditions but the question is, who knows best how to make sure that is the case,” he said. “It’s not the department of labor … it’s parents, it’s grandparents, it’s farmers.
“It bothers me that parents are not sufficient at making decisions about what’s safe for their own kids,” he added.
With the average farmer in Kansas is in his or her early 60s, the new rules will make it even harder, Moran said, to cultivate the next generation of farmers.
“We have a huge problem in agriculture in finding people who want to work on farms. If you take away the experience of working on their own family farm or working for a neighboring farm, you’re reducing the chances that anybody is going to grow up and say, ‘I want to be a farmer,'” he said. “I meet people who want to be teachers. Well the reason, most likely, they want to be teachers is because they had a great teacher when they were in school. It was an experience they had and they discovered what being a teacher meant.”
MORAN, WHO cosponsored legislation last month to make the new farm-youth rules null and void, said the future of long-standing ag programs that expose young people to the industry, like Future Farmers of America and 4-H, are in jeopardy.
Sharing the senator’s concern, Marmaton Valley High FFA instructor Russell Plaschka said the rules would ultimately eliminate any job placement programs, not just FFA.
Any student learner program, whether it be ag ed, business, family and consumer science, industrial arts, automotive, or any program that puts student learners outside of the classroom will be impacted, he said.
“(The new rules) are going to cut 14- and 15-year-olds out of it,” Plaschka said. “They couldn’t even climb up a step latter to change a light bulb the way the new rules are written, because they will be six feet off the ground and that’s considered a hazardous situation.”
The rules also would prohibit youths from using lawn mowers and any energy-powered machines without direct supervision of their parents.
Although the intention of the rules is to create more comprehensive safety standards for children, Plaschka said the labor department missed the mark.
“These aren’t children we’re talking about. We’re talking about young men and women who are trying to decide a career for the rest of their lives and the only way to really do that is to experience that career at a young age,” he said. “Whether it’s working for an area farmer or an area business, right now they can do that at age 14. But if the rules go through, they’re going to have to wait until they’re 16, and even then they will be limited to what they can do.”
Although Moran and Plaschka’s concerns about the impact of the rules on FFA are warranted, the effects it will have on 4-H are unclear.
Kansas 4-H leader Barbara Stone said the rules won’t negatively affect 4-H because “it’s an employment law, and as far as we can see, it won’t have any impact on our programs at all.”
Although he couldn’t provide a specific example of how 4-H could be impacted, Moran guessed there would be unintended consequences to the program.
“4-H has been reluctant to get into anything political so they’re reluctant to say a lot,” he said. “But I do know 4-H clubs that have been very interested in this and have written letters to the Department of Labor.”
The labor department has said because farm-youth labor laws have gone unchanged for nearly 50 years, modernizing policy has become a priority for the department and the Obama administration. Despite a stagnant policy, data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture indicated farm-related accidents were already on the decline before any change in policy.
According to the USDA, agriculture-related injuries for youths under 20 on U.S. farms have decreased from about 13 injuries per 1,000 farms in 2001 to 7.2 injuries per 1,000 farms in 2009. In 2009, there were 15,876 injuries to youths who lived on, worked on, or visited a farm in the United States compared to 29,277 in 2001.
