Washington Does Not Understand Family Farms
I am often asked where I get my work ethic. The answer is easy: from growing up on a farm. I learned about responsibility at an early age by caring for animals and working with my family in the field. To this day, those lessons I learned about the value of an honest day's work have stuck with me.
This is why I was so disappointed when a Washington bureaucrat decided that we needed new rules to protect kids from farms. The proposed rules would have prohibited nieces, nephews, cousins and neighbors from working on a farm. It would have made it harder for kids to detassel or walk beans or any of the other numerous jobs that expose kids to agriculture.
This is a symbol of what's wrong with Washington. We have people writing rules, who do not understand the industries they are regulating. Not surprisingly, the agency backtracked after hearing from outraged farm families.
This was just another uninformed assault on our rural way of life. The fact of the matter is that we desperately need more young people involved in production agriculture. We need more young farmers so that we can ensure that the United States continues to have the safest, most abundant food supply in the world.
Working on a family or a neighbor's farm is a part of the rural way of life. It helps teach young people responsibility and gets them interested in agriculture. Instead of writing regulations to stop it, we ought to be looking for ways to encourage it.
Sincerely,
