Instant adults

Farm boy driving a tractor in North Carolina

The glory days of agricultural in New England are over.  Long ago, the glacial rocks won and the majority of farming moved west.  So you might be surprised to know that there are 7,691 farms in Massachusetts alone producing over $489 million annually.  It is with some astonishment, then, that we are faced with new government regulations that will increase the cost of farming, increase teen unemployment, and at the same time reduce the opportunity for teens to become responsible adults.  What’s not to like?

Growing up on a farm was a wonderful opportunity to learn about cause and effect, personal responsibility, and how to actually do things.  If the cows didn’t get milked, they dried up.  If the cows dried up, the family didn’t have milk to sell or consume.  This was serious; if your chore was to help milk the cows, you didn’t mess around.

It seemed like many things were like that.  The kitchen garden fed the family in season and provided a bounty of canned and frozen produce to last through the winter.  But the garden must be planted, watered, weeded, cultivated, protected from woodchucks and rabbits, and finally harvested.  If your chore was to participate in those activities (and it usually was), the consequences of failure were severe.

Farm boys and girls, at the ripe old age of eight or nine, were often enlisted to steer a hay truck through the winding windrows of bales.  The older teens and adults threw the hay up on the truck as a youngster steered, feet not reaching the pedals.  At the end of the row, one of the older workers would jump into the cab to turn the rig around, and then the whole thing would be repeated in the opposite direction.   Although the lack of seatbelts, car seats, and helmets would today seem scandalous, no one was injured or killed, and a lot of self esteem was rightfully earned.

Farm boys and girls, when leaving for college or the military or their first outside job, actually knew how to do things.  They could replace spark plugs, build a chicken coop, responsibly fire a rifle, drive a tractor, and care for dependent livestock.  When entering the wider world, they had developed a sense of self confidence that was based on real skills and accomplishments.

But no longer.  In our zeal to keep our children perfectly safe, the nanny state is preparing to crack down.  The US Department of Labor is issuing rules to prohibit farm kids under the age of 16 from operating power equipment.  They would also proscribe “children” under the age of 18 from activities involving the storing, marketing, or transportation of raw farm materials. This means that they could not work in “country grain elevators, grain bins, silos, feed lots, stockyards, livestock exchanges and livestock auctions.”

This is nothing short of amazing.  We consider an 18-year-old to be an adult, the age of majority.  But the Federal government is now usurping parental discretion, becoming in effect, a super-parent.    

According to our Federal betters, upon reaching the age of 18, these kids are entitled to vote, but don’t understand economics, having no personal involvement.  They can buy and drive a car, but have little experience in mechanical things and little sense of personal responsibility.  They can join the military and go off to war, but just a day before were considered immature and needing of great protection.  How can we expect them to be successful if we don’t trust them and give them opportunities to grow?  According to the government, they must become instant adults with none of the experiences necessary to do so.

In the old days, the family was responsible for the well being and development of their offspring.  It seems increasingly now that the government has usurped that role.  A good thing? Not likely.  

What I did on my summer vacation

In current times, kids are excused from school for the summer, but for what? To play Wii, spend hours on Facebook, accompany their parents to Florida, and otherwise squander their free hours away? It obviously has nothing to do with industriousness – just try to hire a generously-allowanced neighborhood kid to mow your lawn.

Not so, many years ago. In farm country, we were let out of school in early June and didn’t return till early September. In between, we certainly found some time to camp out in the woods and ride our bikes down shady lanes, but that was not the main event. No, we were let out of school to work. Whenever our own farm work was completed, we hired ourselves out to the neighbors. As the season progressed, we went from picking strawberries to harvesting raspberries, blackberries, and grapes, each in their season. The pay was minimal – a few cents per quart basket – but it added up as long hours passed in the hot sun.

But of course the main event for the older children was haying. A serious affair, for cows must survive the long, cold winter and continue to produce high quality milk throughout that dead season. The only way to ensure their health and productivity was to feed them stored sunshine in the form of hay.

There are typically three harvests of hay – roughly May, June, and July. First, tractors pull mowers through a fragrant mix of timothy, alfalfa, red clover, and birdsfoot trefoil. Then the freshly mown hay is conditioned (crimped and fluffed) to encourage drying. If the hay were baled and stored with too great a moisture content, it would be subject to spoilage, or worse, spontaneous combustion. More than a few horses have succumbed to the former (cattle are hardier) and many a barn lost to the latter.

After a few days, the hay is raked and baled into rectangular bales weighing about 75 pounds, just enough so that the older teens, mostly high school football players and wrestlers, grunted while heaving them up onto the truck. A younger kid could be put to work guiding the truck, in double-granny low, between the rows of bales as they were heaved up and stacked. No need for short legs to reach the brake, clutch, or accelerator pedals… the only requirement was to steer through the gently winding rows of bales. At the end of the field, one of the farmers or an older teen would jump into the cab to wheel the truck around and another pass would begin.

This was hot work, and the farmers took care that their charges had plentiful water, both for drinking and for pouring over glistening, sweaty faces and bare chests and backs. It was a rare pleasure when a hayfield contained an ice-cold spring, usually marked by a green thicket on a hillside, containing a small pool of brilliantly clean, frigid water burbling straight from the earth. Almost as good were the fields that bordered on a farm pond, where cannonball dives were performed amid great uproar during short breaks from the relentless, dusty bales.

When the truck was full, it was driven slowly over farm roads to a barn where it must be unloaded and stacked into a hayloft. If the crew were really lucky, the barn was built into a hillside so the truck could be backed directly into the second-story loft. This part of the operation was, if at all possible, even hotter than those preceding as the barn baked in the midday sun. But given the resilience of youth, a brief pickup basketball game often formed around a rusty hoop nailed to the barn planking after the stacking was done.

So were our summer days, such that a late supper on a wide farmhouse porch, as the gloom thickened and temperatures moderated, was treasured as much as today’s trip to an air conditioned mall on a sultry afternoon.