Opinion: Children working on farms belongs in the past
© Tim Scrivener Once more into the breach. In all my time writing on farming issues, nothing has been guaranteed to generate more negative reaction than the issue of children on farms.
Yet in the wake of the most recent Farm Safety Week and the metronomic regularity with which we see child fatalities occur, I’m willing to take another run at the issue.
My attention was recently caught on social media by posts of a 13-year-old girl running a 250hp tractor and big square baler, as one post noted, “better than most middle-aged men”.
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On a personal level I have a great deal of admiration for such a young person having the work ethic and maturity to undertake such a job.
No doubt they will have, if they wish, a bright future in the industry.
But on an intellectual level, what on earth are we thinking? A young child operating that sort of machinery?
In an industry with a death rate 21 times the all-industry average, in which two, three, four children are killed every year, let alone the much larger number of adults in similar circumstances.
I look back at my own childhood when the golden age of 13 was reached and I suddenly became a source of free – if admittedly enthusiastic – labour.
Overnight, it magically became acceptable to dispatch me into the milking parlour to work night shifts and deal single-handedly with 150 rather large Holstein-Frisian cows.
For my first tractor job, I remember being deposited onto the driver’s seat with instructions to roll a block of grass.
Only after the depositor drove away and my excitement dissipated did I realise – in floods of tears – that nobody had ever shown me how to even operate the tractor, let alone do so in a safe manner.
(Admittedly, it was a Deutz: I’m not sure I could work it out today.)
My longest working day – at the age of 15 – was 26 hours.
Let me pre-empt the arguments which will be flung at the letters page next week.
“The kids want to do it”. “Margins are tight and we need the labour”. “How do we get young people into ag if we don’t start them at a young age?” And, of course, the inimitable: “It’s what we’ve always done”.
What sort of an industry are we operating if we need child labour to underpin it, or must force-feed it from such a tender age just to get them to stay?
Much the same arguments were made when we sent children down mines, up chimneys or under the spinning jenny.
Yes, I was desperately keen to sit behind the wheel of a tractor as a child. But that’s not really an argument for the practice.
What sort of an industry are we operating if we need child labour to underpin it, or must force-feed it from such a tender age just to get them to stay?
If anything, we should be encouraging our kids to look at other options in their formative years to give them an honest choice.
And what about a child’s right to a childhood? They’ve a lifetime of hard graft ahead of them in adulthood.
“It’s what we’ve always done” holds true until suddenly one day it isn’t.
And as with child trappers, climbing boys and cotton scavengers, it all seems perfectly reasonable until we look back one day and say: “What on earth were we thinking?”.