Obama Administration Not Promoting Work Ethic on Family Farms

Not this should really come as a surprise, but the labor department is putting the finishing touches on new regulations that will prevent children from doing many chores around the family farm.  They feel they have the right to tell parents which jobs are acceptable for their children to perform.

You see these parents are too stupid to decide for themselves what is too dangerous for their kids to do.  Below is a list of places children of farmers will no longer be allowed to be:

“would include country grain elevators, grain bins, silos, feed lots, stockyards, livestock exchanges and livestock auctions.”

Is there a rash of farmer’s children being hurt at livestock auctions?  If so, I have not heard about it.

As a child of someone who grew up on a family farm I can tell you that farming is great deal of work and requires a strong work ethic to make it successful.  The hours are long and the work is hard.  Many family owned farms have had the land in their families for generations, they grow up working and learning to respect both the land and the animals.

Profit margins on many farms is very small.  The children help out in order to make the farm profitable enabling the family to live and pay their bills.  Farmers take a great deal of pride in being able to pass the land down their children.  In order to do that successfully the kids need to understand the work ethic it takes to make a farm run properly.  Farming is not something that just anyone can do.  Their has to be a love of the land and end product that enables you to want to put the effort out.  That is something that needs to be taught.

There are plenty of examples of how we have lost the work ethic in this country.  Now we have the government putting regulations into effect that will just further erode it.

“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.

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.”

These regulations will also make it mandatory that you take certification through government programs instead of through agricultural programs such as 4-H.

The government has decided to not just be the nanny at family farms, they have decided that they now have to become the parents.  You no longer have the choice of what you will teach your children about your farm.  They have made it for you.  I guess these kids can go on food stamps when they reach 18 like so many other college students are encouraged to do.

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