Free Republic

The U.S. Department of Labor is withdrawing a rule that would have limited the sorts of work that children can do on farms.

Barack Obama is attacking the family farm – an American tradition. The administration’s Department of Labor implemented new regulations to restrict children from working on the family farm. This is despite the fact that farm accidents and injuries have decreased over the past several years. For generations children and adults have worked together on the family farm. Those days are over. Senators John Thune (R-S.D.) and Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) introduced the Preserving America’s Family Farm Act, to prevent the Department of Labor (DOL) from enacting its controversial proposed restrictions that would ban children from working on family farms. Recently, Senator...

A proposal from the Obama administration to prevent children from doing farm chores has drawn plenty of criticism from rural-district members of Congress. But now it’s attracting barbs from farm kids themselves. The Department of Labor is poised to put the finishing touches on a rule that would apply child-labor laws to children working on family farms, prohibiting them from performing a list of jobs on their own families’ land. Under the rules, children under 18 could no longer work “in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials.”

Everyone in agriculture knew there would be substantial cuts in the new farm bill. Most agricultural organizations had signaled that a “proportional cut” would be acceptable. We’ve realized that preserving the most essential element of the legislation – crop insurance – would be a realistic goal. Toward that end, the House Agriculture Committee had been working with what farmers believe is a realistic number – $23 billion in cuts to the farm bill, with $15 billion of it coming from the commodity title. Recently, the House Budget Committee threw out a new and completely unrealistic number of $181 billion in...

For decades, farmers have given livestock low doses of antibiotics in their feed to speed growth and prevent infection. And, for decades, scientists and public health officials have warned that this practice, known as “subtherapeutic use,” leads to the creation and spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria have grown more common both in people and in meat at the grocery store. Doctors encounter patients with infections that are harder to treat and last year, we saw a massive food recall—the third-largest recall of meat in USDA’s records—thanks to antibiotic-resistant Salmonella in ground turkey.The FDA acknowledges there’s a problem, but has...

“If the federal government can regulate the relationshipbetween parents and their children on their own family’sfarm there is virtually nothing off limits” - Senator Jerry Moran Just when I thought Obama's big government couldn't get more intrusive we have this: (h/t Gateway Pundit and Allen Wall) The U.S. Department of Labor is proposing revisions to child labor regulations that will strengthen the safety requirements for young workers employed in agriculture and related fields. The agricultural hazardous occupations orders under the Fair Labor Standards Act that bar young workers from certain tasks have not been updated since they were promulgated in...

Barack Obama is committed to killing off the family farm – an American tradition. For generations children and adults have worked together on the family farm. Those days are over. Senators John Thune (R-S.D.) and Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) today introduced the Preserving America’s Family Farm Act, to prevent the Department of Labor (DOL) from enacting its controversial proposed restrictions that would ban children from working on family farms. Senator Thune spoke out against the Obama Administration’s proposed labor rules for youth who work on farms and ranches on the Senate floor. The Obama Administration’s rules are so strict they would...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Parents of children who work on the family farm or are in agriculture education programs should thoroughly review proposed changes to child labor laws so they fully understand how the new rules could affect them, a Purdue farm safety specialist advises. "Because the proposed rule changes are 51 pages long, I don't know that many people understand exactly what's being presented," Bill Field said. "The changes not only hold the potential for positive but also significant negative effects to youth less than 16 years old who seek employment or are currently employed in agriculture."

The FDA has won its two-year fight to shut down an Amish farmer who was selling fresh, raw milk to eager consumers in the Washington region, after a judge this month banned Daniel Allgyer from selling his milk across state lines, and he told his customers he'll shut his farm down altogether. The decision has enraged Mr. Allgyer's supporters, some of whom have been buying from him for six years and who say the government is interfering with their parental rights to feed their children. But the Food and Drug Administration, which launched a full investigation complete with a 5...

USDA-backed biofuels plant in Soperton, Georgia has lost taxpayers nearly $60 millionWASHINGTON D.C.—Upon reports Tuesday that a USDA-backed biofuels plant in Soperton, Georgia has lost taxpayers nearly $60 million, IER President Tom Pyleissued the following statement:“Apparently U.S. taxpayers have yet to discover life after Solyndra. Today’s announcement that a USDA-backed biofuels plant has been sold for pennies on the dollar—at a loss of nearly $60 million to U.S. taxpayers —further underscores the point that the federal government should not be in the venture capital business.The Bush administration secured the Range Fuels loan, and the Obama administration doubled down on the...

Revisiting the resilient lifestyle… Things finally collapse, and you go to the basement, start digging out survival gear and freeze dry food. You gather the family around the radio, shotgun in hand and begin worrying about how long the “stuff” will last. OR You get up at six AM as usual, open a bag of your favorite coffee, mixing it 50/50 with the chickory root you gathered in the summer. Opening the spout on the Big Berkey water filter, you fill the percolator you picked up at a yard sale, for 2 bucks. You set the coffee on the woodstove...

Texas needs rain — and needs it quickly — to keep farmers and ranchers from suffering even bigger losses next year from the drought that already has left them with record-breaking losses this year, producers said Friday while in San Antonio. Corn growers in Texas could encounter even bigger losses in 2012 after seeing output fall by 40 percent this year; and rice plantings, which fell by only 2 percent this year, could be cut nearly in half if more water does not become available soon, officials said. “It could drive us to acreage levels we've probably not seen in...

Firstborn is getting married! So yesterday I visit the venues, she wants to be married on a farm with a barn. What do I see at the venue I prefer? In the office, a Sarah Palin bobblehead hung in effigy. Can anyone suggest a farm/venue between Winston and Durham? I would like to patronize a conservative.

--snip-- .. Labor Dept. announced proposal that would help ensure the safety of youth on farms. But,...as farm advocates claim (they) are far too restrictive. “Here’s what the government thinks is common sense,” says Craig Anderson, Agriculture Labor and Safety Services division manager at the Michigan Farm Bureau. “Eliminate work to protect workers. If you don’t work, you can’t be hurt on the job. Who can argue with that?” --snip-- “The DOL assumes that youth under age 16 lack the ‘cognitive ability’ to herd animals on horseback, use battery-powered drills, put hay bales on a bale elevator or use any...

JOHANNESBURG -- South Africa's minister of land reform says black farmers have resold nearly 30 percent of the white farmland bought for them by the government - often back to the previous white owners. Minister Gugile Nkwinti announced the startling indicator of failure at Wednesday's launch of a long-delayed government policy paper to revitalize plans to more equitably distribute agricultural land, redressing historical wrongs. Seventeen years after white minority rule ended, the vast majority of agricultural land remains in the hands of some 40,000 white commercial farmers. Nkwinti said the government had bought 7 percent of the country's commercial farmland...

I was listening to a story on NPR this morning. The story that caught my ear was about a small farm in Alabama that was going out of business. The reason given; they couldn't get any illegal aliens to work cheap due to Alabama's new immigration law. The gist of the story was we need more non-Whites to help the economy. Well last time I checked Alabama has plenty of non-Whites who were born there and more than half of them under the age of 25 are unemployed. Or better yet, back when I was a young man in Kentucky...

EXCERPT "Poor Hillary feels terrible about the way she looks, but she is so busy she isn't making time for her own needs." Making things even worse is her husband of 35 years - who's battled his own weight woes until becoming thinner recently. Bill pointed out that she needed to do something, sources say . "When Hillary asked him how she looked, he told her, 'You're huge! You need to go to a fat farm!' "Then he made things worse by saying treadmills and stair climbers were fun," a pal told The ENQUIRER. "Hillary exploded!"

A new rule being proposed by the federal Department of Transportation would require farmers to get commercial drivers licenses. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which is a part of DOT, wants to adopt standards that would reclassify all farm vehicles and implements as Commercial Motor Vehicles, officials said. Likewise, the proposal, if adopted, would require all farmers and everyone on the farm who operates any of the equipment to obtain a CDL, they added. The proposed rule change would mean that anyone who drives a tractor or operates any piece of motorized farming equipment would be required to pass...

The country is running out of time. We’re broke, nationally, and as the spendthrifts in Washington, D.C. try to discover new and increasingly dishonest, disguised methods by which to hide the scope of the impending disaster, we should be considering what it means for we, the people.There can be no doubt that they are driving us to complete and unrecoverable collapse. I can describe to you what I believe their motives to be, but that doesn’t change the reality, and I’d rather focus on what we can do about it. Time is getting short. It’s possible that there will...

AUSTIN, TX - The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is expected to issue its new proposed rule for mandatory animal traceability very shortly. While USDA already has traceability requirements as part of existing animal disease control programs, the proposed framework goes much further to require animal tagging and tracing even absent any active disease threat. The framework has raised significant concerns among family farm and ranch advocates, who criticize the agency for failing to provide a coherent, factual explanation for the new program’s necessity. “USDA brags about the success of past programs, but has abandoned the principles that made them...