The introduction of Bill 6 in Alberta, along with the badly mishandled communication about what the bill hopes to accomplish, has had the effect of launching a discussion about what is appropriate on a family farm. Every time someone is injured in a farm accident you get the same questions, especially if it’s a child, and there are debates over whether or not children should be involved in a farm overall.
Actually regulating a family farm is going to be difficult because it’s a hybrid of workplace and home, and that workplace can be dangerous. It’s also the case that farm parents do have a tendency to use children as a cheap labor pool – there’s a reason farm families were normally quite massive back in the old days, you don’t have to hire help if you have seven kids. There are plenty of farm families who will use relatively unscientific reasoning to justify this, stuff about building a work ethic or increased parental bonds when you work together on the farm. I personally don’t buy that argument, I’m not sure my work ethic was generally improved by having to help out with farm tasks, and I’m sure I’d be just as close to my parents if they worked in a bank somewhere and I didn’t see them working all the time. I might even harbor less hatred for cows if I didn’t have to grow up around the stupid, smelly walking steaks. However, that’s not to say getting kids to help out is a bad thing, while it might be a cheap labor pool it does mean stuff gets done that wouldn’t otherwise, and while I might hate cows they did pay for some of my education, which almost makes it okay that all they did was try to step on my feet and make my dad shout colourful German phrases at them. I’m not against kids working on the farm, so long as parents emphasize safety.
My parents did emphasize safety. There was a literal line in the yard which I could not cross until they were confident I could be safe around equipment – it was caused by the installation of a gas line, but it just happened to be the perfect division between the relatively safe part of the yard where equipment couldn’t travel and the part where most of it was kept. It was drilled into our heads basically from birth that we should always be aware of every piece of equipment, that harvest and seeding meant restricted play areas, and safety was always emphasized when we were old enough to take on different responsibilities. It also just so happened that my mother somehow had a catalog of friends of friends who got horrible injuries when they didn’t take safety information seriously, which always served to make her point clear.
So we grew up safe and relatively uninjured, and the same can be said for the majority of farm kids. The thing is that there are still accidents, and the farm is not an inherently safe place. Can this be solved by regulation? Probably not, because it’s still the case where it’s a workplace mixed in with a family home, and the operations are not large enough to have constant oversight. While plenty of businesses can afford to have someone who regularly oversees whether or not people are following standards, a family farm has, at most, a disapproving spouse, and then when they leave for the weekend, that’s when someone falls off a roof, as I may or may not know from personal experience and my father’s crooked nose. A permanent health and safety observer is not something that a farm budget can pay for, and most violations of health and safety protocols on farms are caused by the owner and operator not using their better judgement anyway, rather than forcing someone else to do something unsafe. The only way to effectively regulate would be someone live-in, and honestly a worried spouse probably is the most effective option – a farmer is actually willing to listen to their spouse, more than anyone that might be hired for the purpose.
But I don’t think there’s a reason why children can’t be involved in the operation, provided precautions are taken. To ensure precautions are taken, I have a solution. It’s not increased regulations, it’s an increase in worried spouses. We need to have a conference, either in a physical location or offered online, where the biggest worrier on each farm is given a chance to learn about all the things that they need to fret about on their operation. It’ll educate about dangers to avoid, and the farmer and kids have to listen to this person, because they’re always there and will not let it go if they do something unsafe. Instead of a fine, you would have to deal with an angry partner or guardian, and the impact of that is going to be more of an incentive than the largest fines a government can levy. After all, the words most commonly said after an injury on the farm in my youth were always “don’t tell mom,” because she was our unofficial OSHA department. While my mom is not available on every farm in the province, an army of her equivalents would lead to the safest farms in the land.
