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market-farming - Re: [Market-farming] child labor

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  • From: Leigh Hauter <lh AT pressroom.com>
  • To: market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] child labor
  • Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2003 16:30:11 -0500

I think (or at least I hope) that Marc was being tongue in cheek.

I agree with Bill about farm work. My 20 something son has been helping out for the past couple of years but this year he decided that he would rather carry huge boulders back and forth across the fields rather than have to transplant another seedlings or plant another row of lettuce seeds. Sometimes, I sort of understand his point of view. He's finally decided that college is a better bet.

However, back to the original subject. This last year we took a teenager into our home, a relative who was taken out of her fathers home by the county because he hit her. We didn't feel a county home was any place for anyone, let alone a relative. So we took her in as our daughter. Actually, she is a delightful kid.

So, this winter, we took her down to a beach in Mexico with us (since we find farming to be profitable we can go on such vacations) down to a remote fishing village almost to Belize. There wasn't much in the town but a nice beach and great snorkling and a tropical forest, and a rickity building with florescent lights and tables and benches that was called a restaurant. Great seafood. We went in and the daughter of the woman doing the cooking on the other end of the building, a girl about 12, was waiting the table.

Our new daughter thought this was just terrible. "Abuse," she thought, Which led to an interesting dinner discussion about whether it was truly abuse for the girl to help her mother make a living for her family. And what was the difference between the girl waiting tables and serving food and helping the family and for an American teenager to sit in front of a computer for hours on in gossiping with their friends over the internet.

Sure is a different world we live in.

But back to farming. I remember coming home from Vietnam and still having time in the military and being assigned to a military hospital in southern Alabama (this was close to the time when our current 'leader' went AWOL for a year) and how some of our patients, the ones in the worse condition, were local farm kids who had gotten caught up in farm machinery or had a tractor turn over on them. Kids with horrible burns, crushed bodies, and maimed limbs.

The question, again, is it the parents fault that they had their children working on the farm? Is this just the cost of 'doing' farming? Should we legislate work rules for children on farms? Should we have regulations trying to make farm equipment safer? How do we deal with this real problem? Or should we?




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