Of course that got changed. The city folk saw to that.
Some states have the driver's license age set at 16. It used to be 16 practically everywhere for a full license. I got mine shortly after my 16th birthday after having my learner's permit for a couple of months. It's changed a bit and now entry level drivers are a little older in general.
Then of course I had been driving with my father illegally for years.
Anyway it used to be that some agracultural states would issue a 'farm license' to youngsters that lived in rural areas so they could pitch in with the family farm and make runs to town or whatever. All this seems to have been done away with, probably because of complaints from city people.
A while ago there was a federal movement to not permit people under the age of 16 or 18 to run farm machinery. I do not know how it worked out but when I heard about it I was kind of irked.
It was just one more case of city people trying to run the affairs of rural people, a group that they don't understand. Another case of ignorant people trying to impose their personal values on someone else.
Someone saw a kid running a tractor and thought of their own kid and could not picture their kid running a piece of machinery like that at such an early age and decided it was wrong.
It never occurred to them that that kid started learning as a toddler while sitting on his father's lap while he was plowing the lower 40.
Farmers are not entirely stupid. They are not going to turn an untrained person loose with an inherently dangerous and extremely expensive of equipment. That youngster has been extensively trained on that unit for years before being loose on the Lower 40 to plow.
I would imagine that the person that doesn't like what they see is judging based on his own kids. While his kids may be honor students at some private school they probably can't operate an unpowered push mower safely. Or maybe his kid is just a dolt.
A lot of farm kids are different. They are expected to pitch in on the family farm because it generally needs all the manpower it can get. In fact the teenager on the plow may very well he the farmer's daughter.
It's a different world out on the farm. Kids there often learn different skills at an earlier age and it's not fair for them to be judged by those that have no clue.
I'm somewhat surprised that I didn't hear that legislation of some type prohibiting teenagers from running farm equipment hasn't been enacted because in general Congress seems to come charging in and enacting a lot of laws on things they do not understand.
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