movement in this country for the most part is an urban thing.It looks like the cities tend to have more liberals in them and the rural areas tend to be more conservative.
I recently read an interesting thread about how a lot of farm families start putting their kids to work at what seems to urbanites a very early age.
Kids under the age of ten start to learn to run machinery and do things and according to the farmers that chimed in this is a very common thing. Frankly, I am not surprised.
While farming isn't as labor intensive as it was a century ago, there always seems like there is something to do on a family run farm. There is planting, harvesting, working with livestock and a whole pile of things to do that would keep a family going from sunrise to sunset.
Urbanites really have no idea as to what running a farm entails. Many of them are so clueless if you ask them where meat comes from they will say it comes from the back room of a supermarket.
Some people were astonished to find out that little kids run tractors and other machinery on family farms and think it should be illegal.
First of all it is not their family to push their urban values on. It simply is none of their business. Secondly there are not a whole lot of farmers out there that are likely to turn a child loose with an expensive piece of machinery without extensive instruction. For one thing that kind of equipment is damned expensive to fix and so is the damage it can incur if not operated properly.
Likely the kid started out barely past infancy on his father's lap on the family tractor learning the ins and outs of safe operation of the equipment in question. By the time he is in school he has very well spent a few hundred hours on his dad's lap learning how to operate it. The first time he plows a straight row is a rite of passage.
What was interesting on that thread I read was when someone found safety statistics on farms and farm kids in specific. It looked to me like the kid was in more danger of getting hurt on their way to school in an automobile than he was running a tractor.
That makes sense to me because in addition to dad training the youngster, there isn't a whole lot of vehicular traffic on the lower forty for a tractor to run into.
Farm kids learn a lot of skills from their parents and generally grow up pretty competent in area that require hands on skills.
It is funny to watch because I know a couple that met in college and married. He is a city slicker and she is a farm girl yet she has been polished up pretty good. You wouldn't know she was a farm girl looking at her. What's funny to watch in the dynamics of their relationship. I have to surpress a smirk when I see hands with manicured and polished nails change the spark plug on a lawn mower. She can fix most anything.
She also shot an antelope in Wyoming at over 400 yards a while back. One shot. Oh, yeah. I watched her drop a tree last year and crush the empty can she was using as an aiming point for the tree to fall on. She's pretty good with a chain saw.
A couple of hours after she bucked the tree up I saw her leave the house with her husband dressed to the nines and looking like a million bucks.
She grew up on a family farm growing vegetables, working with livestock and running machinery and started at an early age.
A lot of kids start working around the family farm as little kids and do quite well in life. Some leave the farm and pursue careers elsewhere but they bring not only a competence but a work ethic along with them.
What was interesting in the service was the difference between the city kids and the country bumpkins. A lot of country kids grew up as hunters. A lot of the city kids regarded a tree as being a wild animal.
The country boys simply took their hunting skills into the service and simply found out that the only difference they were dealing with is the species they were hunting. The simply stopped hunting animals and started hunting men.
Whatever career paths they choose, farm kids bring a lot of practical knowledge with them.
The truth of the matter is that urbanites have no right to judge the way family farmers run their farms and raise their children and they damned well should butt out.
That holds trebly true for elected governmental urbanites. Government interference in a case like this is just another case of government trying to regulate something they know nothing about.
To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this:
http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY
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Pic, I grew up on a farm, in Australia, and what you've written is pretty much how it was for my brothers and myself (no sisters). The family farm is a mix of sheep and cropping. One trick my father did with all four of us was that when we were tall enough to see over the dash of the farm pickup while standing on the seat (kindergarden age), he would load up the back of the pickup with hay or bags of grain to feed the sheep, and when we were in the right field, put the pickup in first on idle and have us steer in a circle while he was in the back unloading feed for the sheep. The pickup would crawl along at a couple of miles an hour with plenty of time for him to see if the pickup was getting too close to a fence or ditch or tree. If that happened, he could jump off the back of the pickup and get back in to drive it to the middle of the field where there weren't any obstacles, then start over again.
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