How many of them woke up there 10 year old children and pulled a calf at 2 am...
Who else stood on a state highway as the cattle were on the road dodging semis?
Who picked his dad off the road when he got hit by a drunk driver ?
I did it all before I was 10. Then it got serious.
I meant to drop this with my
"But whatever, just different viewpoints I guess." close. But since you continued...
If you haven't been in other family businesses, how can you have any claim that they were so much different from farming?
And your examples could be considered child abuse. I find it incredible that child labor laws, and basic worker safety protocols don't (or didn't at the time) apply to children working on farms. And I have done some of those thing at around age 10 (cattle loose on the road at night). And when I look back at that, some driver could have been seriously hurt, because my Dad (and apparently yours) were not proactive enough to assure the cattle were fenced in well enough to keep them off a highway. It's irresponsible.
I ran extremely loud equipment for many hours as a kid, and it is probably responsible for some of my hearing loss and tinnitus today. I'd come in for lunch, and could hardly hear a conversation for most of the meal, my ears were ringing. At mega-corp, there were OSHA regulations for noise exposure, and they were enforced, and I think that was a good thing. The noise level was nowhere near what I was exposed to as a kid. And that was for adults, farm children who didn't know any better were just left unprotected.
I worked around powerful, dangerous machinery that had little in the way of guards around it. I remember being near a power take off driving the discharge of the chopped hay wagon, and my Dad calling out
"Tuck your shirt in, it could get caught on that!". I didn't think much of it at the time, just did as he said, but I later became aware of just how powerful something like that would be, and the almost instant damage it could cause if it grabbed my shirt-tail. I know better now, and am much more careful in my workshop, and around power equipment. I mentioned before that I was up close and personal with farm accidents and the crippling effects.
You can attempt to glamorize all that if you want. I don't get it. And as I said before:
"But whatever, just different viewpoints I guess."
-ERD50