Latest / Barnyard Language / Buddy seats, ice cream, and the research w/ Florence Becot of the National Farm Medicine Center

Transcript

Buddy seats, ice cream, and the research w/ Florence Becot of the National Farm Medicine Center · Barnyard Language

• 0:14
  Caite: Welcome to Barnyard Language.
• 0:15
  We are Katie and Arlene and Iowa sheep farmer and an Ontario dairy
• 0:19
  farmer with six kids, two husbands, and a whole lot of chaos between us.
• 0:23
  So kick off your boots, reheat your coffee, and join us for
• 0:26
  some barnyard language, honest.
• 0:27
  Talk about running farms and raising
• 0:29
  Arlene: families.
• 0:30
  In case your kids haven't already learned all the swears from being in the barn,
• 0:33
  it might be a good idea to put on some headphones or turn down the volume.
• 0:37
  While many of our guests are professionals, they
• 0:39
  aren't your professionals.
• 0:40
  If you need personalized advice, consult your people.
• 0:44
  We are back for our final episode of Season two.
• 0:48
  Katie, can you believe it?
• 0:51
  Caite: I cannot.
• 0:52
  Arlene, it seems like just yesterday that I was waiting with bated breath
• 0:57
  to see if you would give in and agree to, to do this show with me, Arlene.
• 1:01
  And as always, I am incredibly grateful that you did, because
• 1:04
  A, there wouldn't have been an episode one, let alone a season two
• 1:08
  if it had been up to me to do it.
• 1:10
  And B two I, I don't know if I started with a or with one.
• 1:14
  Yeah, there numbers, whatever.
• 1:16
  This is why I needed a co-host, guys.
• 1:19
  Uh, Nobody would've wanted to listen to it if it had just been me, because A, it
• 1:25
  would've been terrible and disorganized, and B, we would not have gotten all
• 1:29
  the great conversations that we've had.
• 1:31
  So,
• 1:32
  Arlene: well, I have always appreciated from the very beginning that you asked
• 1:35
  me to join and I'm glad that I said yes and same, same for AB and one and two,
• 1:42
  because it definitely wouldn't have happened with just my skills either.
• 1:45
  So it's amazing how our two skill sets, considering we only met each other once in
• 1:50
  person and only really ever talked online, that our skill sets really combined so
• 1:55
  well and have turned into something that we enjoy and we hope that you do too.
• 2:00
  So before we go on summer vacation, Katie, what's happening on the farm?
• 2:04
  What's new with the kids?
• 2:05
  What's the news from
• 2:06
  Caite: Iowa?
• 2:08
  I feel like I should be yelling something like teamwork makes the dream work.
• 2:11
  Arlene.
• 2:12
  Yeah.
• 2:13
  Or not.
• 2:14
  Um, we're still a lot cooler than the rest of the country, but it is
• 2:19
  hotter than hell here this week it's supposed to be over 90 every day for
• 2:23
  like 12 days or something stupid.
• 2:25
  Um, and in Iowa that means also like 300% humidity, upside.
• 2:31
  The corn likes it, uh, nobody else does.
• 2:34
  So that's a bit of a downer.
• 2:37
  Um, other than that, the kids are kind of getting ready to go back to school.
• 2:43
  Um, the.
• 2:46
  Girl child has been referred back to speech therapy starting
• 2:49
  again this fall, I guess.
• 2:51
  Um, what?
• 2:53
  Oh my God.
• 2:57
  Once again, if anybody can figure out why Spotify keeps auto playing, um, about two
• 3:04
  minutes into our intros, that'd be great.
• 3:06
  'cause yeah, it was just playing a little c and c music factory.
• 3:10
  'cause I've been pumping up the jams for the kids in the morning.
• 3:15
  Um, yeah, so the girl child's going back to speech therapy.
• 3:22
  We went to the dentist last week for their preschool checkups and I
• 3:25
  tried to convince the dentist that we should get a discount because neither
• 3:29
  of my kids has a mouthful of teeth.
• 3:32
  Um, they're growing like weeds.
• 3:36
  It's about time to buy new school clothes.
• 3:40
  Uh, my daughter bought a toy called a Magic mixy.
• 3:43
  Don't buy this thing for your kids.
• 3:45
  It's evil.
• 3:46
  It's like a, what is, it's, it's like a furby that comes in a
• 3:49
  glass ball with a magic wand.
• 3:52
  Yikes.
• 3:53
  I don't know.
• 3:53
  I'm, I'm pretty sure it's possessed.
• 3:56
  Uh, one of the boy child's toys has started randomly making
• 4:00
  engine noises and backup beeping noises in the middle of the night.
• 4:05
  And there is an animal somewhere in my house making an unidentifiable noise.
• 4:10
  I don't think it is a baby bat, but I don't know what it's.
• 4:14
  Arlene: And your Spotify just starts randomly too.
• 4:16
  So all the noise are happening.
• 4:18
  Noises are happening all the time.
• 4:20
  Caite: And also my son learned from one of his little friends
• 4:25
  to ask Alexa to play things.
• 4:28
  No, Alexa, I'm not actually talking to you.
• 4:30
  Um,
• 4:34
  anyway, he keeps requesting that she, who shall not be named.
• 4:40
  Arlene: I can't hear it from my end, but obviously you can.
• 4:42
  Well, that's
• 4:43
  Caite: good because it was playing everybody dance now again.
• 4:46
  Oh, perfect.
• 4:47
  That that's the song.
• 4:48
  Yes, yes.
• 4:50
  Um, he has learned to ask her to play things, but he still has too much of a
• 4:57
  baby voice for her to understand him.
• 5:00
  So he yells at her until she randomly plays stuff.
• 5:03
  Right.
• 5:04
  And it's mostly been about not usually what he wants.
• 5:08
  Yeah.
• 5:09
  It was yesterday.
• 5:10
  It was like 20 minutes of which animals fart, which was not what he was asking
• 5:15
  for, but he thought it was hilarious.
• 5:16
  So then we all had to listen to it.
• 5:18
  Um, other than that, not a whole hell of a lot.
• 5:24
  Um, it's quite the update.
• 5:26
  Raccoon killing.
• 5:27
  That's, that's the farm up at date.
• 5:30
  I've been killing raccoons.
• 5:31
  Um, yeah, they're going after your fellow.
• 5:33
  I'll say.
• 5:34
  Yeah.
• 5:34
  I, I don't really believe in killing anything.
• 5:38
  I don't intend to eat.
• 5:39
  It is not the way I was raised.
• 5:43
  Um, I.
• 5:46
  But also I don't really appreciate having my birds killed, and especially
• 5:51
  in the way that animals like raccoons tend to do it, it does not tend
• 5:54
  to be a fast and humane situation.
• 5:58
  So, um, that's, that, that's what's been happening at your place, Arlene?
• 6:06
  Arlene: Well, I had a birthday, so that was, you know, as an yay, yay.
• 6:11
  As an adult, it's both like something you kind of look forward to and
• 6:17
  it feels a bit anti-climatic.
• 6:19
  But anyway, it was fine.
• 6:20
  It was a birthday, I got presents.
• 6:22
  It was great, and I got to go away on the weekend.
• 6:26
  A friend of mine from University Days, she's in Australia, so a friend that I
• 6:31
  actually went to visit a few years ago for my 40th birthday, she was back in
• 6:35
  Canada with her husband and family to visit her parents and extended family.
• 6:40
  So her home is about a five hour drive from here.
• 6:45
  So another friend and I went to visit her there, since she had already made the
• 6:50
  trek halfway around the world, we, you know, could travel within the province.
• 6:54
  So we went to see her, just the two of us.
• 6:56
  So that was.
• 6:57
  Super relaxing because we got to just hang out as grownups and not
• 7:02
  look after anyone else's food needs.
• 7:04
  As three moms getting together, we spent an inordinate amount of time
• 7:08
  talking about all the things that our kids will and won't eat and
• 7:11
  how annoying it is to be constantly preparing food for little people who
• 7:16
  will and won't eat what you prepare.
• 7:18
  So at least we know that's a universal problem.
• 7:21
  And farm wise, like I said, my daughter is uh, away for a little while at
• 7:28
  a cow show and my husband is making a couple of trips there this week.
• 7:33
  Both drop off a heifer attended, judging, judging conference
• 7:36
  and then to watch the show.
• 7:38
  So of course those events are spread out by a couple of days.
• 7:41
  So he thought about spending most of the week there, but then thought better of it.
• 7:45
  And he is gonna make a few trips back and forth, so he's
• 7:47
  spending a lot of time driving.
• 7:49
  I'm at home with the boys and milking cows and looking after stuff
• 7:53
  here, so not a lot of excitement.
• 7:56
  It's hot, it's stormy some of the time.
• 8:00
  We're still spending a lot of time swimming.
• 8:02
  I find that with older kids, when they were younger, I
• 8:05
  was trying to fill the days.
• 8:08
  Not that I'm not now, but you know, when they were little I
• 8:11
  was going to a lot of playgrounds and playgroups, going to library
• 8:15
  programs, all of that kind of stuff.
• 8:17
  And it was kind of like, get everybody outta the house so we can tire them out.
• 8:21
  Then maybe they'll have a nap, all that kind of stuff.
• 8:23
  And now, It's not as much like that, and they all have chores to do.
• 8:28
  So it's making sure that we're, even if we do go somewhere, making sure
• 8:31
  that we're back in time for them to do their chores and for me to do mine.
• 8:34
  And so it's just a different flow.
• 8:36
  I'm not saying it's better or worse, but just different.
• 8:39
  And I'm still kind of adjusting to that.
• 8:42
  So yeah, summer, and while Katie's talking about back to school, we are
• 8:47
  not even at the halfway point yet.
• 8:49
  So I cannot even think yet about the fact that school will be
• 8:52
  happening because there's still so much somewhere left to go.
• 8:56
  Caite: We actually still have about another month until school starts back,
• 9:01
  but the girl child is going to two weeks of summer school, which starts on Monday.
• 9:08
  Sure.
• 9:08
  So that gets us pretty much to when school starts.
• 9:12
  Yeah.
• 9:13
  That pretty much, pretty much is, I am very grateful that my
• 9:16
  kids are still young enough that they're excited to go to school.
• 9:19
  The boy child isn't, but he will be once he starts back.
• 9:22
  Mm-hmm.
• 9:23
  Hopefully.
• 9:25
  But yeah, it's, it's going fast.
• 9:29
  Arlene: Yeah.
• 9:29
  So the next five weeks after this week, we're gonna be doing reruns.
• 9:34
  So if you haven't heard them before, lucky you, you get to,
• 9:38
  uh, catch some of our favorites.
• 9:39
  Not that we have favorites, they're like children, right?
• 9:42
  We love all of us.
• 9:43
  I have favorites.
• 9:44
  Okay, we have some favorites and these are some classics that we're going back to.
• 9:48
  So the next five Thursdays after this week are gonna be repeats.
• 9:53
  And um, the episode this week, we're talking to someone about rural childcare
• 10:02
  and she sent an update a little while ago about the fact that childcare has actually
• 10:07
  made it into this year's farm bill.
• 10:09
  So as a Canadian, I don't exactly know what that means, but Katie,
• 10:13
  maybe you can tell people what they need to do about that.
• 10:15
  Is that something that you can lobby about?
• 10:17
  Should you people go and find that section and read it?
• 10:20
  What do you need to know about
• 10:21
  Caite: that?
• 10:22
  Ideally you would read the whole thing, but I have the feeling that
• 10:25
  it's probably a couple thousand pages.
• 10:27
  Um, I think even among American farmers, it is not often known how
• 10:34
  many things fall under the farm bill, like rural childcare, that seems like
• 10:40
  it would be under some department other than the Department of Ag, but
• 10:46
  nonetheless, yes, anyone you can lobby.
• 10:48
  Um, even just being on the board of our local daycare and realizing.
• 10:55
  How few even community members, let alone politicians have any
• 10:59
  idea about the issues facing rural childcare centers and rural parents.
• 11:05
  Um, lobby anyone.
• 11:07
  You can just random strangers in the streets.
• 11:11
  Stop 'em and tell 'em a few factoids.
• 11:13
  Yeah.
• 11:13
  Have you heard about childcare?
• 11:14
  You know, as, as parents, plenty of people have stopped us to give us random
• 11:20
  thoughts on how we're living our lives.
• 11:22
  So I think it's really time that we go ahead and Sure.
• 11:25
  Stop other people to give us, give them our thoughts on children.
• 11:30
  There you go.
• 11:31
  Arlene: Yeah.
• 11:32
  Well, we'll go ahead and listen to our interview with Florence because she has
• 11:36
  a lot to say about rural child childcare and it was a really interesting chat.
• 11:39
  So here she is.
• 11:40
  Yes.
• 11:41
  Today we are talking to Florence bcu, who is joining us from Central Wisconsin,
• 11:45
  and she's a rural s sociologist, I'm not gonna say psychologist,
• 11:49
  rural sociologist and researcher at the National Farm Medicine Center.
• 11:53
  So Florence, we start each of our interviews with the same
• 11:55
  question, and this is a way to introduce yourself to our listeners.
• 11:58
  So we always ask, what are you growing?
• 11:59
  So for farming gifts that covers crops and livestock, but can also use,
• 12:04
  include families, careers, businesses, and all kinds of other stuff.
• 12:07
  So Florence, what are
• 12:08
  Florence: you growing?
• 12:09
  Thanks, Dar.
• 12:10
  Um, when there's no snow on the ground here in central Wisconsin, I do
• 12:13
  garden, um, and I grow, uh, vegetables.
• 12:16
  Um, but as far as my day job, uh, I grow data as a researcher.
• 12:21
  Um, and the other thing too that I try to do with my research is to grow
• 12:24
  spaces for people's lived experiences to be shared more broadly and spaces
• 12:31
  for people to talk about solutions that could help address, um, their, you know,
• 12:35
  whatever challenges they may be facing.
• 12:40
  Arlene: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
• 12:42
  What, um, what vegetables are your favorites to grow?
• 12:45
  Florence: Um, I love to grow the kinds that, uh, are easy to maintain.
• 12:52
  Potatoes.
• 12:53
  Same is a great one.
• 12:54
  Uh, until I move to Wisconsin, I could not grow potatoes.
• 12:57
  For some reason I didn't have right soil, and now they do wonderfully.
• 13:00
  Uh, I like to do tomatoes and I love green beans.
• 13:03
  Uh, and I grow the, the thin beans, french style beans that I
• 13:08
  have a hard time finding around.
• 13:10
  Um, and they are so easy to freeze as well and weed them through the
• 13:13
  year, so nothing fancy really.
• 13:17
  Arlene: Yeah.
• 13:18
  But delicious.
• 13:19
  Caite: And Florence, where did you grow up?
• 13:22
  Florence: I grew up in the northwest part of France, um, in Brittany.
• 13:26
  Um, you might, folks might have heard of Normandy, um, as
• 13:29
  it pertains to World War ii.
• 13:33
  Caite: And is your family involved in agriculture or is this,
• 13:36
  uh, uh, new frontier for you?
• 13:40
  Florence: It is not a new frontier for me.
• 13:43
  Uh, both of my parents grew up on farms, um, and as far as I can tell our
• 13:49
  entire family lineage up until to my parents was involved in agriculture.
• 13:54
  Um, the fun story too, kind of small town stories that my mom's dad worked
• 14:00
  on my, on the farm of my dad's parents.
• 14:05
  Sorry, that's getting complicated.
• 14:06
  My dad's parents had a largely larger farm that my mom's parents,
• 14:12
  so my, um, my maternal grandfather worked on, um, My ERs grandparents,
• 14:18
  sorry, this is getting complicated.
• 14:20
  And then that's all right.
• 14:22
  So while my parents, uh, did not, um, take over the farm, my uncle, one of
• 14:27
  on both sides of my parents have had uncles who have, uh, taken the farm.
• 14:32
  Um, we still have the farmhouse and farmland.
• 14:36
  Um, and um, yeah, and so growing up, spent my weekends, holidays on
• 14:42
  grandparents farms, um, family dinners, which in friends are usually hours long.
• 14:48
  Think about Thanksgiving on a regular basis.
• 14:50
  Um, we talked a lot about agriculture, um, and the thing too that talked a
• 14:55
  lot about, I didn't realize until more recently, kind of wondering about why
• 15:00
  am I so interested in those topics?
• 15:02
  Talked a lot about ag policy.
• 15:04
  I grew up at the time of, uh, U S S R falling.
• 15:08
  Um, you know, I vividly remember when the, the Berlin Wall fell.
• 15:13
  And at that time too, you have the whole development of the European Union, uh,
• 15:17
  and the common agricultural policies with a lot of questions about what
• 15:23
  they were going to do to agriculture.
• 15:25
  And so there was a lot of angst around what are those common
• 15:29
  agricultural policies going to do.
• 15:31
  To farmers.
• 15:32
  Um, and so my uncles could not stop talking about that.
• 15:37
  Uh, and I remember us kids being like, oh man, we're so bored.
• 15:44
  Arlene: Yeah.
• 15:45
  This again.
• 15:46
  Yep.
• 15:47
  So in the region of France that you're from, what kinds of farms are we talking
• 15:51
  about in terms of sky size and what, what was produced on those farms?
• 15:55
  Florence: Yeah, so, um, you know, it's, it's changed the way that
• 15:59
  it has in the US and in Canada.
• 16:01
  Um, the Bri Brittany has a good year round climate for vegetable.
• 16:06
  Um, so you have a fair amount of, um, you know, the fresh veggies that you
• 16:11
  will find in, in grocery stores, right?
• 16:12
  A lot of cauliflowers, broccoli, I think not as much, um, potatoes as well.
• 16:18
  Um, and a lot of it too around the coast line.
• 16:21
  Uh, very good soils.
• 16:23
  Um, a lot of, um, dairy as well.
• 16:26
  Um, and, uh, hog hog farming and hog farming ga became
• 16:31
  kind of bigger over time.
• 16:33
  Um, and I think that there are more pigs than, uh, people
• 16:38
  in the region of Brittany.
• 16:39
  Um, as far as scale, you know, they're much smaller than
• 16:43
  they are in the US and Canada.
• 16:45
  Um, I, I think, think of maybe about a traditional Wisconsin farm, the way that
• 16:50
  we tend to think about, that'd be more of the kind of scare that you've had.
• 16:55
  But there has been a process of concentration consolidation, right?
• 16:58
  As folks have retired, um, as there has been fewer farmers on the lands,
• 17:03
  but they've also been more efficient, you know, covering more land.
• 17:07
  Um, and in terms of the economy, I think that agriculture as well as food
• 17:12
  processing or, you know, it's been a long time since I looked, but are one
• 17:16
  of the leading industries in terms of dollars, um, for this region of France.
• 17:21
  So very, very important to the region and a lot of pride in
• 17:25
  agriculture and its history.
• 17:29
  Sure.
• 17:31
  Arlene: Can you tell us a little bit more about what you're, where you're working
• 17:35
  now at the National Farm Medicine Center, both kind of what the center does and how,
• 17:39
  how you as an individual ended up there?
• 17:42
  Florence: Yeah, so the National Farm Medicine Center, um, you know, was
• 17:47
  started by physicians, um, in the sense that the National Farm Medicine Center
• 17:51
  is based, um, at the Marshville Clinic health system, um, which has been
• 17:56
  around the Marshfield Clinic health system has been around since the 1910s.
• 18:00
  And I think, um, I, I might get in trouble with my colleagues, but I
• 18:04
  think that the early research around farmers' lungs starting in the forties
• 18:10
  or the fifties, I think, um, that is when, uh, ducks will see farmers
• 18:15
  coming in, uh, with their lungs.
• 18:17
  Um, you know, the, the consequences of like the, of
• 18:20
  hay and bacteria, I think, or.
• 18:23
  Again, I'm gonna get in trouble.
• 18:24
  I need to read up on that.
• 18:26
  But essentially, uh, the first research grant that was brought to
• 18:30
  Marshfield was, uh, focused on the farm population, was to look at Farmer's Lung.
• 18:35
  Then over the years, there was research done to look at cancer in agriculture.
• 18:40
  Um, and then I think that the center was formerly funded in the 1980s, and
• 18:46
  then in the 1990s there started to be more focus on children in agriculture
• 18:51
  and exposures to risk of children.
• 18:54
  Um, Dr.
• 18:54
  Barb Lee, um, has been around since the 1980s, um, and she's, she's
• 19:00
  been instrumental in creating the first national centers, um, to focus
• 19:07
  on the safety of, um, of children.
• 19:10
  And that center has been funded for over 25 years by C D C, national Institute
• 19:14
  for Occupational Health and Safety.
• 19:16
  And so I, over the years, the National for Medicine Center and the Children's Center
• 19:21
  has gone, has gone from being a research center that was very grounded in, in
• 19:25
  health and medical research to over time having more diversity of research with
• 19:31
  engineering, uh, nursing, bioinformatics, anthropology, family studies, myself
• 19:37
  as a rural sociologist, The way that I ended up there, it's a fun story.
• 19:44
  Um, I was working my dissertation.
• 19:46
  I was doing research, um, on, on childcare a little bit.
• 19:49
  Health insurance was more my focus.
• 19:51
  And I remember I was, um, you know, looking through what
• 19:55
  research has been done previously.
• 19:57
  And I find this report that looked at childcare for migrant farm workers.
• 20:02
  Um, and I was like, who are these people?
• 20:05
  And that report was from Marshfield.
• 20:08
  And so I started reading up on them and, you know, it was my last year
• 20:11
  I was going to need a job and I was reading up on them and I'm like,
• 20:15
  these people are really interesting.
• 20:17
  I wonder if they're hiring.
• 20:19
  They were hiring.
• 20:21
  And uh, and I've been there for over a three years now.
• 20:25
  That's
• 20:25
  Caite: so interesting because I think we really forget how different some
• 20:31
  of the medical needs of farmers are just from things we're exposed to,
• 20:34
  but also childcare and engineering and that we we're in a very different
• 20:39
  industry than a lot of folks are.
• 20:41
  You know, there's not many industries where your whole
• 20:44
  family lives at your work.
• 20:46
  You know, it's not a common, a common thing and it's definitely different.
• 20:54
  Um, yeah.
• 20:55
  Yeah.
• 20:55
  So we were reading a little about your research background, and one thing that
• 20:59
  really jumped out was the quote that her research first considers the ways
• 21:03
  in which difficulties meeting social needs such as healthcare, childcare,
• 21:07
  or aging, expand beyond the confines of the personal sphere and can have
• 21:11
  direct implications on the farm, including the adoption of farm safety
• 21:14
  practices and farm business development.
• 21:17
  Um, it sounds so much like what we talk about on a podcast, but normally
• 21:21
  we're looking at just the family.
• 21:24
  Um, can you expand on that and explain why moving beyond to that personal sphere
• 21:31
  and into the community is so important?
• 21:34
  Florence: Yeah.
• 21:34
  Into the business and to the community?
• 21:36
  Um, I think, you know, when we look at issues like childcare and
• 21:41
  health insurance, um, we, we tend to see them as household level
• 21:44
  issues, as personal issues, right?
• 21:46
  And we, we don't talk about it.
• 21:48
  Um, And, and I think too in agriculture, depends who you talk to, but we know
• 21:53
  that in agriculture, as you were saying, Katie, the, the family is
• 21:58
  oftentimes on the farm work site.
• 22:00
  They oftentimes leave, you know, the, the, the, the farm.
• 22:03
  The house is oftentimes on the farm where the farm business sits, not for everyone.
• 22:06
  Right.
• 22:07
  But we also know that one of the big reason why farms have been able
• 22:12
  to persist over time and to stay on the land, even though it's a very,
• 22:16
  um, unpredictable occupation, it's when there is a lot of changes.
• 22:20
  Uh, one of the things that we know that help farms stay on the land is
• 22:24
  because they share resources between the household and the farm business, right?
• 22:30
  In terms of like, people split their time, uh, people are able
• 22:34
  to, um, you know, work on the farm and not necessarily pay themselves.
• 22:39
  Uh, and the same too with the money, right?
• 22:40
  The, the money can be allocated to the household or the farm business
• 22:44
  depending on, on how you look at it.
• 22:45
  Right?
• 22:46
  When we started, um, you know, and I need to give a lot of credit to my colleague
• 22:51
  Osh Wood at the Ohio State University, who really is the one that brought
• 22:55
  me into her research on these topics.
• 22:58
  Um, really what she started hearing when she was talking with farmers was how
• 23:04
  health insurance and in particular the cost of health insurance, which Arlene,
• 23:08
  I'd be curious to hear about Canada, how it works, um, in the US there.
• 23:12
  Um, when she asked the question, what are the top barriers to your farm business?
• 23:18
  Um, they, she was doing a survey, I'm, I'm gonna backtrack a little bit.
• 23:22
  This was like 2006, 2007.
• 23:24
  She was doing a survey with colleagues.
• 23:26
  They were looking at, uh, what enables farms to thrive and to stay on the land.
• 23:32
  Um, and she asked, can we please ask, add an option about cost of health insurance?
• 23:37
  So all they had was, you know, access to land, um, access to capital, uh,
• 23:42
  farming knowledge, and she had to argue with her colleagues or very
• 23:47
  strongly say, Hey, can we please add the cost of health insurance?
• 23:51
  And they did.
• 23:52
  Um, lo and behold, that came up as the top two or top three
• 23:57
  challenge that farmers face.
• 24:00
  And so that what, that kind of what started, um, you know, that line
• 24:03
  of research, um, to, to really, you know, hearing, talking to farmers at
• 24:09
  the kitchen table about what some of their challenges were around those
• 24:13
  very hassle level issues, um, and how they're impacting the business.
• 24:17
  And so, fast forward, you know, 10, 15 years later, um, we've been,
• 24:21
  you know, we've been doing research together for the last eight years, I
• 24:24
  think, um, we're really, when we ask farmers about, you know, what it's
• 24:30
  like to, you know, how, you know, sorry, I'm not being very clear here.
• 24:37
  Um, you know, kind of ask them, you know what, when we talk about health
• 24:40
  insurance, we, we've heard over and over people saying it's too expensive
• 24:45
  or, I need to have an off-farm job to pay for my health insurance or to
• 24:49
  be able to access health insurance.
• 24:51
  But what that means is it takes time away from my ability to work on the farm.
• 24:56
  Uh, we've heard people say, I'm on purpose keeping my investment on the
• 25:00
  farm lower so that my farming income stays below a particular threshold
• 25:06
  so that I can be eligible for, uh, Medicaid, you know, public insurance
• 25:10
  for the kids or for themselves.
• 25:12
  We also heard from farmers who say, I'm waiting until 60, I'm 65
• 25:17
  to get some of that stuff done.
• 25:19
  And so really what we are hearing is the extent to which people
• 25:24
  challenges with health insurance, childcare as well, um, have direct
• 25:28
  implications on the farm business.
• 25:31
  Um, and we know that farm businesses too, um, already
• 25:34
  connected to the local economy.
• 25:36
  Um, and when we talk too about health insurance and childcare, and
• 25:40
  we talk about hiring folks, right?
• 25:43
  Hiring farm workers, the, the ways in which people might not wanna take a job
• 25:49
  if he doesn't offer health insurance.
• 25:51
  Um, and so it, it's kind of how all these things are connected,
• 25:55
  but that's somehow in farm policies we haven't been talking about.
• 25:59
  It's almost like what belongs to the household.
• 26:01
  We just don't talk about it when we talk about farming.
• 26:05
  And our research really points to the fact that.
• 26:10
  It's unfortunate, um, be because it's, and, and I'd be curious to hear from
• 26:16
  you, Arlene and, and Katie around how these things impact your farm, right?
• 26:19
  And, and how you have to navigate them and the kind of choices
• 26:22
  that you end up having to make.
• 26:24
  Um,
• 26:26
  Arlene: yeah.
• 26:26
  I would say, I mean, as a, as a, this is a discussion that we've, Katie and I on
• 26:31
  a personal level have had before, and, and I don't know what the statistics are.
• 26:35
  I, it would be interesting to know, but I, anecdotally I can say that as
• 26:41
  someone who lives in a country with socialized medicine, I, we are uninsured
• 26:47
  in terms of, you know, extra, um, you know, medical expenses, the things
• 26:52
  that someone, the type of of medical benefits that someone would give with
• 26:56
  a, a full-time job, you know, dental, eye coverage, those types of things.
• 27:00
  But we don't have to pay into a system, um, for our day-to-day expenses, right?
• 27:07
  I mean, we can go to the doctor, we could go to the emergency room, any
• 27:11
  of those types of things, we as a farm family don't have to worry about paying
• 27:15
  anything extra for those services.
• 27:17
  They're covered for us.
• 27:18
  So I, I think, you know, on a anecdotal sense that it's definitely is a huge
• 27:24
  impact for farm families because I, I know a lot of families who have the
• 27:28
  opportunity, like my husband and I, where both members of the household,
• 27:33
  both members of a partnership, can work full-time on the farm.
• 27:36
  Yeah.
• 27:37
  Because that's not something that we, that we have to, to pay extra for.
• 27:42
  Mm-hmm.
• 27:42
  It's, it's not something that we need, that we need to consider
• 27:44
  or, or take into account.
• 27:48
  And I, I think, Katie, on a, a personal level, that's one of the reasons that you
• 27:52
  and your husband do have off-farm jobs is that, is that the healthcare aspect is
• 27:59
  Caite: Yeah.
• 28:00
  I mean, Jim, now it's the biggest piece, has been able to take a job that doesn't
• 28:04
  offer healthcare, but only because my job offers very good healthcare.
• 28:10
  Um, we'd be totally screwed if, you know, if I lost that source of healthcare.
• 28:16
  And I know a lot of families who are in that position of if they make any more
• 28:21
  income than they lose any, um, you know, they can't afford to better their lives
• 28:29
  by getting better jobs or what have you, because the cost of the benefits that
• 28:34
  they're getting, like insurance through the government is so much greater than
• 28:39
  the extra income that they would bring in.
• 28:41
  Or, you know, the, the cost of childcare is so high that the
• 28:45
  extra income would not offset it.
• 28:47
  Um, I know I was a stay at home parent for the first three and a
• 28:52
  half years of our kids' lives because my income would not have covered
• 28:56
  childcare, let alone anything else.
• 29:00
  You know, I mean, I would've been working entirely to not be raising my children.
• 29:05
  And that's, I.
• 29:08
  It's a, it's a whole thing.
• 29:10
  Yeah.
• 29:11
  Florence: So, and I often think about one farmer that we talked to a few years
• 29:16
  ago that was talking about kind of like the, the crazy gymnastics that, you
• 29:20
  know, you just talked about Katie, right?
• 29:23
  And she said like, the, the rational choice for my children, for my family is
• 29:27
  the irrational choice for my business.
• 29:29
  And that's so interesting, right?
• 29:31
  Because we talk so much about we need to be rational and economic actors.
• 29:35
  And so much of the farm business trainings are about helping people being rational
• 29:40
  and make the best business decisions.
• 29:42
  But in reality, once you start incorporating the needs of the
• 29:47
  household, and I think it's, it's similar in other occupations, right?
• 29:52
  When we start incorporating what we need on our day to day, uh, folks cannot make
• 29:58
  those best rational economic decisions.
• 30:01
  And so also what we know and what we've looked at is what are some
• 30:05
  of the long-term consequences on the farm business, right?
• 30:09
  Because early in the years, right?
• 30:12
  Usually when people start a business or take over a business, right, that's
• 30:16
  when they tend to start a family.
• 30:18
  That's when folks or most vulnerable in their adult years as young adults, right?
• 30:23
  They're just finishing school.
• 30:25
  Or they might have been done from school for a year, but they might meet
• 30:29
  a partner, they might get married, and then they might start having children.
• 30:32
  And it's at the time that where your financial assets.
• 30:36
  You have less of them, but there's also a lot of pressure because you
• 30:39
  wanna grow your family that has a cost, but you wanna grow your business
• 30:43
  or you need to pay to pay financial assets of the older generations.
• 30:47
  Or you need to make sure you're paying enough into the farms so that the older
• 30:50
  generations has enough retirement, um, you know, e enough financial access to
• 30:57
  financial resources for whatever their, their needs might be in their data or
• 31:00
  years elder care or who knows, right?
• 31:03
  And, and it's what, what we've looked to in our research is how those
• 31:08
  long-term consequences on, on the trajectory of the farm business.
• 31:12
  And so when we have agencies like the US Department of Agriculture who has
• 31:17
  had a lot of initiatives to support beginning farmers to recruit the next
• 31:21
  generation of farmers, but they don't talk about these really important things.
• 31:26
  And, and we've heard from farmers too, who, who people have given
• 31:31
  up farming because they couldn't make it work for their families.
• 31:35
  And so it's almost like, are we, are those investments not
• 31:40
  as effective as they could be?
• 31:42
  Because we're not talking about things that impacts the
• 31:45
  day-to-day of people's lives.
• 31:47
  So we're working on this.
• 31:51
  Yeah.
• 31:51
  So the ones bring up those issues.
• 31:55
  Arlene: Yeah.
• 31:55
  So the one study that I was reading of yours where it talked
• 31:58
  about childcare for farm families and, and so what's the title?
• 32:01
  A key strategy to Keeping children safe yet largely absent from farm programming.
• 32:06
  So who did you talk to about that in that study?
• 32:08
  Because that's the kind of what you were already talking about is, is that there's,
• 32:13
  there are all these programs that are supposed to be talking to farmers and yet
• 32:16
  it's not talking about all the things that actually people need to, to know about.
• 32:23
  Florence: So this was part of a five year projects that is funded
• 32:28
  by C D C, national Institute for Occupational Safety and have through
• 32:32
  the Children's Center in Marshfield.
• 32:34
  The premise of that project was that for all these years, farm safety experts,
• 32:39
  farm research points to the fact that the more children are in the farm work
• 32:45
  site, the more they're exposed to risk.
• 32:48
  And so they point to the importance of, in particular for
• 32:51
  the youngest children, right.
• 32:52
  The non, what we call the non-working bystanding children.
• 32:56
  We're thinking, we're talking babies, toddlers, you know, um, the, it's
• 33:01
  the importance of supervising them of the work site and that any kind
• 33:06
  of supervision by an adult, right.
• 33:07
  Or by, you know, a, a teenager, a responsible teenager.
• 33:11
  Right.
• 33:11
  It's paid unpaid.
• 33:12
  It's, it's at the house with grandma.
• 33:15
  It's a high school babysitter that comes over.
• 33:18
  It's childcare center, it's school.
• 33:20
  But, but the idea is like, if, if we, you know, the, the best way
• 33:25
  to protect children is by limiting their time in the farm works at,
• 33:29
  in particular, when folks are doing things that are dangerous, right?
• 33:31
  Like maybe there's a lot of tractor work that needs to be done in the
• 33:35
  barn, uh, or um, or around the barn.
• 33:37
  That might not be the good time to have two, right?
• 33:39
  But what we noticed is that as much as there's been recommendations, kind of
• 33:44
  tying back to what we're just saying, there's been virtually zero research
• 33:48
  on childcare for the farm population in the US but in other countries.
• 33:54
  I have dug around in French, in English, those other, the languages that I speak,
• 34:00
  no one's talking about it so little.
• 34:02
  It talks about women in agriculture, but it talks about them as professionals.
• 34:06
  It doesn't talk very much about them or very little as caregivers.
• 34:12
  Um, and it doesn't really talk about what are people's lived realities.
• 34:17
  And so this project was about, well, let's look at this.
• 34:21
  Let's ask the question.
• 34:22
  'cause the other thing too that I kept hearing, and it was either
• 34:25
  implicit or explicit, is that farm parents did not wanna use childcare.
• 34:30
  But I kept thinking kind of similar.
• 34:32
  And, and I think the, the project on health insurance really put the big
• 34:35
  bug in my ear because we often say, oh, farmers, they're tough crowd.
• 34:39
  They don't want to go to the doctor.
• 34:41
  But yet here we were talking to farmers who said, I go to the
• 34:44
  doctor if it wasn't so expensive.
• 34:46
  And so it was like, are are, are we keep, is there some kind of like always this
• 34:52
  narrative that farmers don't want help or farmers don't wanna go to the doctor,
• 34:57
  don't wanna use childcare, but have we really asked people what they wanna do?
• 35:03
  And so that's what this project is about.
• 35:06
  This study, Arlene, that you brought up was really kind of like to, to get a
• 35:10
  sense of what's the lay of the length.
• 35:11
  So before talking to farmers, we wanted to be what's out there in terms of
• 35:16
  resources for farmers, if they were out and about looking for ideas on
• 35:22
  how they juggle, um, children and farm work, if they were out looking for
• 35:27
  ideas on how do I think through having children while growing my farm business?
• 35:33
  Right.
• 35:33
  And so what we did is two things.
• 35:35
  We did, um, what's called environmental scan.
• 35:38
  Essentially we went on the internet and we did keyword searches and
• 35:42
  we looked at what's out there for people who want information about
• 35:45
  children, childcare and farming.
• 35:48
  Um, and then, and we looked through those documents and we looked
• 35:51
  at what are they talking about?
• 35:53
  And then we looked at the extent to which they're just like talking
• 35:57
  about it superficially or are they actually providing direct
• 36:01
  actionable recommendations, ideas, or are they not talking about it?
• 36:06
  And the other thing too that we did is we did interviews.
• 36:09
  Um, with what we call Kim informants.
• 36:12
  So those are folks who are in professional set up to work
• 36:16
  directly with farmers, right?
• 36:17
  So we've talked to folks from farm organizations, we talked to folks
• 36:21
  from Extension, we talked to folks from Federal and State Department of
• 36:25
  Agriculture, and we essentially asked them, um, but how do you integrate
• 36:29
  children in childcare into your work?
• 36:31
  And we also asked them, what do you see farm parents do when it comes
• 36:35
  to navigating children and the farm?
• 36:38
  And so what, it was fascinating because on one hand, when I look at the documents,
• 36:43
  when I look at how are children talked about childcare is not really talked
• 36:47
  about, children is talked about, but more from the perspective of farms are
• 36:51
  wonderful places to raise children.
• 36:53
  And you have a lot of smiling families.
• 36:55
  And I don't wanna take that away from people.
• 36:57
  I think that this has been, um, you know, people really
• 37:02
  enjoy having the kids around.
• 37:04
  It's a source of enjoyment for many people at the same time, what we found is that
• 37:09
  those documents, um, and it could be, you know, a, an extension pamphlet, it could
• 37:15
  be the webpages of the farm organizations.
• 37:18
  They only show the, the, the shiny part.
• 37:21
  There is no part about here's what happens when the kid's gonna throw a tantrum
• 37:26
  and here's what you know, and here's, you know, um, you know, a, a toddler
• 37:31
  that has a lot of needs and is gonna interrupt you every other minute, right?
• 37:35
  If not sooner.
• 37:36
  And when we talk to folks too, What we heard was, it was, again,
• 37:41
  fascinating, was well, we don't really do any programming around it.
• 37:45
  And the reasons we're like, yeah, we don't hear about it.
• 37:47
  It's not our job.
• 37:48
  We haven't thought about it.
• 37:49
  Farmers don't complain about it.
• 37:52
  But then when we ask about, well, what do you see farm parents doing
• 37:55
  and, and how is childcare for them?
• 37:58
  They knew it was hard.
• 37:59
  That that was like fascinating was so many of them.
• 38:02
  And a lot of them also were farmers or from a farm background
• 38:05
  would say like, yeah, it's really hard for the younger farmers.
• 38:08
  Like, I don't envy them.
• 38:10
  Or they talk about, um, how yeah, what I see the kids around a lot because
• 38:16
  there's not really childcare in the area.
• 38:17
  And so it was like what we found was like that disconnect of like, we know there is
• 38:22
  a problem but we don't talk about it and then we don't really do anything about it.
• 38:26
  And so as researchers what we do is we dug a little deeper and we're like,
• 38:31
  why don't we doing anything about it?
• 38:33
  And so we dug deeper in the sense that we looked at, we thought about
• 38:38
  women historically in agriculture has been, have been invisible.
• 38:41
  Right?
• 38:42
  Or kind of like farm women, maybe they do the farm work but they're not necess
• 38:46
  seen as a farmer in their own Right.
• 38:48
  Right.
• 38:49
  They're like the farmer's wife.
• 38:51
  And we've also talked about how a society, we don't always talk about,
• 38:58
  um, childcare or it's women's work, but also how's a society We rec,
• 39:03
  we recognize some form of work.
• 39:05
  As, um, being forms of work that we pay for that have a, a monetary value on it
• 39:13
  and other forms of work like caregiving that doesn't have monetary value on it.
• 39:17
  So we kind of started thinking about why is it that we don't talk about
• 39:21
  this and is essentially is caregiving seen as women's work that they're, you
• 39:28
  know, we haven't talked about it and we don't necessarily see it as a problem.
• 39:32
  And talking about it could actually be pushing back against what we
• 39:37
  see as the traditional family model of what it's like to have a farm.
• 39:44
  Sorry, that was a long explanation, Arlene.
• 39:46
  Arlene: No, that's great.
• 39:47
  Yeah, that's great.
• 39:48
  And it's, it's true.
• 39:49
  I mean, there's, there's so much of that, you know, not seeing the value
• 39:53
  in childcare, both, you know, as a society, it doesn't feel like we
• 39:58
  value childcare workers, but we also don't value the people who are, are
• 40:02
  doing it for no pay, which is mm-hmm.
• 40:05
  More often than not women.
• 40:06
  But, you know, even if you're only, I say only in quote marks, even if you're only
• 40:12
  looking after your own kids for no money.
• 40:16
  You are providing a good to society and a, and a good to your family, but
• 40:20
  there's, yeah, there's no economic value placed, placed on that work.
• 40:24
  And it is work.
• 40:25
  We know how much work that is.
• 40:27
  Mm-hmm.
• 40:27
  Yeah.
• 40:28
  And, and that part that you talked about, about only seeing the shiny parts, I
• 40:32
  mean, exact That's exactly true too.
• 40:34
  Right.
• 40:34
  We only wanna talk about how good it is for kids to be raised on a farm, and
• 40:37
  that's a huge piece of why we do this podcast, is because we acknowledge that
• 40:41
  yes, we also believe this is a wonderful place to raise kids, but it's also, as
• 40:45
  we all know, a dangerous place to raise kids and a hard place to raise kids.
• 40:49
  And it's, and you know, there's, there's so many risks and it's, you know, their,
• 40:55
  their presence on a work site, because that's what a farm is, is dangerous
• 41:00
  for them and distracting for adults, and also dangerous for adults sometimes
• 41:04
  if you're distracted by your kids.
• 41:05
  And Yeah, it's, it's that cycle that nobody really wants to talk about.
• 41:09
  I mean, we do talk about farm safety for kids, but Yeah.
• 41:12
  But incorporating that piece of childcare is one of the solutions and mm-hmm.
• 41:17
  I agree with you.
• 41:18
  We, we can't say that people don't want it because they're not accessing
• 41:21
  it, because if, if it's not provided accessible and available, then.
• 41:29
  How can they access it?
• 41:30
  Yeah.
• 41:30
  How can they use it?
• 41:30
  Right?
• 41:31
  Yeah.
• 41:31
  And, and people are using lots of informal care.
• 41:34
  Mm-hmm.
• 41:34
  Um, but, but same thing, right?
• 41:36
  Grandma's maybe not getting paid or Yeah.
• 41:39
  Grandpa isn't, or Yeah, they're, they're, they're going on a tractor maybe more
• 41:44
  than they and their parents would like.
• 41:45
  But that's, you know, the buddy seat for the, for those days is
• 41:49
  gonna be the safest place, but yeah.
• 41:51
  Mm-hmm.
• 41:51
  It's not, it's not the most productive and it's maybe not the
• 41:54
  best for, for anyone, but it's the situation that, that they're in.
• 41:58
  Florence: Yep.
• 41:58
  Yep.
• 41:59
  Yeah, I, I hear you.
• 42:01
  And, and you know, to me, like I, I, I think a lot about
• 42:04
  what happens here, right?
• 42:06
  In the context of, of of other places that I know.
• 42:09
  Right?
• 42:10
  And it's not to say that one is better than another.
• 42:13
  There is no perfect place.
• 42:14
  Right.
• 42:14
  We can always think that grass is greener on the other side.
• 42:18
  There is always like patches of Brown anywhere that we go, right?
• 42:22
  But often reflect about, you know, I grew up in France, which thing that I didn't
• 42:26
  share too, um, is that my mom was a childcare provider for most of her career.
• 42:31
  She had, um, a little, um, home-based center.
• 42:34
  She would get, she was accredited through the government for the
• 42:38
  quality certifications and France.
• 42:40
  Usually it's like three, three to four kids.
• 42:43
  And there, and there's like strict restrictions around like if you
• 42:46
  have babies versus toddlers, right?
• 42:48
  Um, And you know, a lot of, you know, I grew up in a rural
• 42:52
  area, town of 3000 people.
• 42:54
  We were, you know, nearby to a large metropolitan area, so you had
• 42:57
  a fair amount of people commuting.
• 42:59
  Right.
• 42:59
  But over the years, I mean, she had children from farm families, um, and
• 43:05
  you know, and so that idea that farmers don't wanna use childcare, I think
• 43:08
  too, once we started talking to farm parents and we started with farm women.
• 43:13
  So after we did that first phase of trying to see like,
• 43:16
  what's the landscape out there?
• 43:17
  What are, what is being said or not said about children and childcare and
• 43:21
  agriculture, then we were like, alright, let, let's talk to farm parents.
• 43:26
  The first thing that we did was focus groups and photovoice
• 43:29
  activity with farm women.
• 43:32
  And we really debated around this one a lot.
• 43:34
  Do we include dads, moms?
• 43:36
  Who do we talk to?
• 43:37
  We decided to start with women raising children in agriculture.
• 43:41
  Um, because we, we do know that as a society women still play a
• 43:46
  primary role in raising children.
• 43:48
  And when you do focus groups, which are those group discussions, you want
• 43:52
  to make sure that people are gonna feel comfortable and are not going to
• 43:55
  be alienated by too much difference.
• 43:58
  And we were worried that if we introduce, um, you know, that if
• 44:03
  we have moms and dads together, are there things that people are
• 44:06
  not gonna feel comfortable saying?
• 44:07
  We started with mom, with, with women, and it didn't have to be biological children.
• 44:12
  We also need to talk to the, the, the men at some point, because
• 44:17
  they also play a really important role that I think we underplay.
• 44:20
  The reality is, you know, there's always budget restrictions
• 44:24
  around what we do, right?
• 44:24
  But anyways, to speak to the extent that people wanna talk about this, our goal
• 44:31
  is to talk to 30 women in, uh, 30 women.
• 44:35
  And we're like, you know, it's gonna take us five weeks to find
• 44:38
  30 women willing to talk to us.
• 44:41
  We were so wrong in five days.
• 44:45
  We had 108 women sign up and we're like, whoa.
• 44:48
  We were, we're like, this is awesome.
• 44:51
  And like, we've clearly hit a nerve.
• 44:53
  Um, and so with Shoshana, my collaborator, we went back and we're like, all
• 44:57
  right, originally we were going to do these focus groups in person.
• 45:01
  We were going to travel.
• 45:02
  We're not doing that anymore because of Covid.
• 45:04
  So, 'cause part of the focus group was we were going to give a financial incentive.
• 45:09
  And so we wanna make sure that we could give it to everyone
• 45:12
  and not just a few, right?
• 45:14
  So we reshuffle things.
• 45:16
  So in the end, we talked to over 70, 70 women, uh, over 13 focus groups.
• 45:21
  Um, they were principally from Ohio, uh, Vermont and Wisconsin.
• 45:26
  Those are the states where we start our study.
• 45:29
  And um, I will tell you that almost every focus group I was
• 45:32
  in tears at one point or another.
• 45:34
  Um, it was heavy.
• 45:36
  It was so heavy.
• 45:37
  Um, because I think that what women talked about was how much they love.
• 45:42
  Having their tuner around, but as you were seeing Katie and Arlene, it's also hard.
• 45:47
  It's nerve wracking.
• 45:49
  And the first question that we would ask was, you know, it, it's
• 45:54
  a typical day in October, um, from the moment that the children get up
• 45:58
  to the moment that they go to bed, where are they, what are they doing?
• 46:02
  Who is with them?
• 46:03
  And I will tell you that hearing women over 70 of them sharing that, uh,
• 46:09
  it's exhausting because the amount of gymnastics that people are having
• 46:13
  to do the amount of like what for two hours they're with my mom and
• 46:17
  then my dad comes over and then picks them up and brings them over them.
• 46:20
  I mean, somebody talks about like we're passing the baton and
• 46:23
  so when we think about quality, what is quality childcare, right?
• 46:28
  Or what's quality supervision?
• 46:30
  Yeah.
• 46:31
  Maybe they're on the farm with their families, but they're not
• 46:34
  getting that much attention.
• 46:35
  Uh, we talked about moms who were say, yeah, my kid just had to learn
• 46:40
  to scream in a stroller and be in their shoulder for five hours.
• 46:44
  And I think too, like, so as much as we heard people love having their kids
• 46:49
  around, they also would not mind help and help can come in a lot of different ways.
• 46:55
  Right?
• 46:56
  But um, and what we heard too is that they are absolutely the people who will
• 47:01
  never use childcare no matter what.
• 47:04
  But I think they're a minority.
• 47:07
  And I, I haven't done the math.
• 47:08
  Exactly.
• 47:09
  You know, I need to go back and look at how many times
• 47:11
  these different things come up.
• 47:12
  Right.
• 47:13
  Most of the time we heard like, oh man, like if there was childcare that was
• 47:17
  available, affordable, we will use it.
• 47:21
  Because it's that idea that they're doing this very dangerous
• 47:25
  jobs with little kids around.
• 47:27
  So the level of stress that we heard from these women was through the roof.
• 47:33
  Um, almost every group, one woman, at least one woman, talked about
• 47:37
  being de like having been diagnosed, having a formative depression,
• 47:41
  prepartum postpartum later on.
• 47:44
  Um, women talked about having tried to find help, could not find it.
• 47:49
  And so that's the other thing too, is in the US there has been a lot of
• 47:52
  initiatives to support mental health.
• 47:55
  And I think in Canada too, there's been a lot more discussion about mental
• 47:58
  health and agriculture, but we tend to think of farmer as this, like, you
• 48:02
  know, as older or as as men, right?
• 48:06
  When you look at the pamphlets for mental health and stress stuff, it's
• 48:09
  always, almost always a picture.
• 48:12
  Of a man order.
• 48:15
  Um, the picture of the mom with like three kids in tow, that never happens.
• 48:20
  But men, that really needs to happen because we just did.
• 48:24
  So in our last stage of the study, which just did a survey of foreign
• 48:29
  parents, and here we asked anyone involved in raising children on
• 48:33
  farms, so it could be biological foster parents, uh, grandparents.
• 48:38
  Uh, we asked them, you know, fill out the survey.
• 48:40
  So we ended up hearing from 860 people from all over the US and I think
• 48:46
  that it's 40% of people said that in their household, someone has been,
• 48:52
  has had pre or postpartum depression.
• 48:55
  It feels huge and we, I don't think we talk about these things
• 49:04
  Caite: when it seems like too, when we're talking about the farm business, even
• 49:07
  if it's not a dangerous production part of the farm business, you know, we don't
• 49:13
  ask ad executives in New York City to take three kids to the office with them
• 49:17
  and expect them to get something done.
• 49:19
  You know, it's, they would be, it's ridiculous, right?
• 49:22
  Yeah.
• 49:23
  You know, and it's, it's when we were doing farmer's market, you know, I had
• 49:29
  so many people say, well, it's so great that you can bring your kids with you.
• 49:31
  And I'm like, I, I love my kids more than anything, but they're not super helpful.
• 49:37
  You know, I mean, they're, they're five and six, they wanna run,
• 49:40
  run around in circles, you know, they're not helpful, really.
• 49:46
  I mean, sometimes they are, but not by and large.
• 49:48
  And, and then God forbid you get the people who say things like, well
• 49:53
  just tell them not to do X, Y, and Z.
• 49:56
  Like, you know, even if I'm fairly sure that they won't, I'm not willing
• 50:01
  to literally stake their lives on their ability to remember that I told
• 50:08
  them not to run out in a driveway when grandpa's driving tractors around.
• 50:12
  You know?
• 50:12
  Yeah.
• 50:12
  I mean, it's, that's literally a life or death consequence.
• 50:15
  I'm not gonna, I mean, I feel like I'm a pretty good parent, but I'm not going
• 50:19
  to stake, you know, their lives on how solidly I've parented a five-year-old.
• 50:26
  You know?
• 50:27
  I mean, it's, it's ridiculous.
• 50:31
  And yeah, I think I hadn't really considered it, but the, the far mental
• 50:36
  health stuff we see is so much about older men talking about crop prices
• 50:42
  being bad and not, you know, we can't access healthcare, or I have an
• 50:48
  aging family member that I can't care for, or I have children that I can't
• 50:52
  care for, or whatever else it is.
• 50:56
  It's never about that other stress.
• 50:59
  And to just address the.
• 51:03
  The chemical parts of mental health care without addressing,
• 51:08
  actually having support for families doesn't really do that much good.
• 51:15
  Um, yeah,
• 51:16
  Florence: and I don't wanna take away the fact that, you know, you know, folks in
• 51:23
  agriculture right, need support and, and that the challenges are not real, right.
• 51:28
  Of, of the older farmer struggling with the, the prices.
• 51:32
  Like, I don't wanna take that away.
• 51:33
  Like that's, that's real, right?
• 51:35
  But at the same time, that scope of what we talk about needs to be much broader.
• 51:43
  Um, and, and the differences in realities too along the life course that I was
• 51:48
  talking with someone yesterday, she said, oh man, like when, when the children
• 51:52
  were old enough to go to school, oh that was such a breath of fresh air because
• 51:57
  they were out of my way for many hours.
• 52:00
  And so we often talk about school as the place where people, you
• 52:03
  know, where kids get educated.
• 52:04
  It's also a form of childcare where you know that between this time and
• 52:08
  this time, the kids are not around.
• 52:10
  Uh, and we heard that over and over again, right?
• 52:12
  How like the crazy jigsaw puzzles that people play and be like,
• 52:16
  alright, like, between this time and this time, the kids are out.
• 52:19
  So I'm gonna do like all these things and I've got my giant to-do list.
• 52:22
  So people are like, you know, like going super fast through these things.
• 52:28
  And then like from the safety perspective, right, is like, We know that from
• 52:32
  the safety perspective need to take time and not rush through things.
• 52:36
  'cause that tends to be when accidents happen.
• 52:38
  But I think too, the thing that really puzzled me, and it's a tricky one
• 52:42
  for me to talk about, because it, the, the, the farm safety programming
• 52:47
  spends a lot of time telling people what to do and what not to do.
• 52:51
  But again, like with the childcare piece, has never formally spent
• 52:56
  time thinking about how childcare is expensive, is not there.
• 53:04
  And so I think like telling parents don't bring your children to the work
• 53:07
  site becomes tone deaf quickly when folks don't have other alternatives.
• 53:14
  And it's like, well, what do you want me to do?
• 53:15
  Um, and so I think there's that extra layer of like, yeah, I know
• 53:20
  they're not supposed to be there.
• 53:21
  Um, you know, when we asked if parents were concerned that their parents,
• 53:25
  their kids could get hurt, I think it was, I don't remember the number.
• 53:30
  I, I don't wanna misquote it, but it was quite high that you have a, a high
• 53:34
  level of like the mental burden of knowing your kids could get hurt at any
• 53:40
  time, but you don't know what to do.
• 53:44
  You don't know what are other alternatives or what to do.
• 53:49
  Caite: And I think too, to me, that was such a, it's such a large part
• 53:54
  of doing this podcast is at least giving parents permission that.
• 53:59
  No, maybe it's not ideal for your kid to watch as much TV as they do.
• 54:02
  I know.
• 54:03
  My kids watch a lot of tv.
• 54:04
  We heard that, but, but it's safer than being out in the driveway, you know?
• 54:09
  Yeah.
• 54:09
  So, I mean, is it ideal?
• 54:12
  No.
• 54:13
  Is it safer?
• 54:14
  Yes.
• 54:15
  You know, so do that thing and hopefully we'll come up with some better
• 54:19
  plan along the way, but, you know.
• 54:22
  Yeah.
• 54:23
  Um, so as someone with kids in rural childcare, and I was just,
• 54:28
  um, doing little Googling here.
• 54:31
  My kids are five and six, so they're, you know, in school.
• 54:35
  But during the summer we're paying about 1200 to $1,400 a month for childcare.
• 54:43
  And I mean, that's not out of line at all for what childcare runs.
• 54:49
  A lot of centers around here have six to 12 month wait lists.
• 54:53
  Um, I'm on the board for our daycare as well, and I can tell you that $1,400
• 54:58
  a month for two kids is not anywhere close to breaking even for the center,
• 55:03
  let alone actually making money.
• 55:04
  And they're a community nonprofit, but they still can't afford to
• 55:07
  just throw money out the door.
• 55:09
  Um, but you still have to pay your staff and feed children and pay for insurance.
• 55:15
  Um, the community we live in has a poverty rate of 43%.
• 55:20
  So paying for childcare at a rate of $14,000 a year in a town where
• 55:26
  the median family income is 56,000 is, um, not really working out.
• 55:34
  I mean, it's what, like 28% of their annual income, and that's for two kids.
• 55:40
  That's not for a bigger family or infants, which is more expensive.
• 55:45
  Um, so how do we get people to understand on a, on a larger scale level that
• 55:54
  childcare is not a family problem, that it is a community problem, and
• 55:59
  that investing in kids being safe and growing up with early intervention
• 56:07
  for things they might need with good community support with that, you know,
• 56:13
  that good childcare can be such a benefit to families and to children.
• 56:18
  But it's seen as such a like, well, if you can't afford daycare, that's
• 56:22
  because you should get a better job.
• 56:24
  You know, not, or you shouldn't have children.
• 56:27
  Yeah.
• 56:27
  Or you shouldn't have children.
• 56:29
  Like, cool.
• 56:30
  So there's this huge lack of young farmers, but don't have kids because
• 56:35
  you won't be able to support them.
• 56:37
  Florence: Yeah.
• 56:38
  And, and Katie, I I will say too, it's, it's a business.
• 56:41
  It's, it's a business issue.
• 56:44
  And what we've seen in recent years, in particular since Covid, is how much more
• 56:48
  the business community has gotten on board with the importance of childcare.
• 56:54
  Um, just my county here, my rural county, um, they now have a childcare
• 56:59
  task force and they released a survey to the business community to ask about
• 57:05
  what are the needs you offer as benefit.
• 57:07
  Um, I think it's, um, the, what I'm hearing is I think that we have reached
• 57:16
  a point where in a lot of places we people already to do something about
• 57:20
  it, but it's how do we go about it and the complexity of starting any
• 57:26
  kind of childcare center given the economics that you just talked about.
• 57:30
  So when we were doing the survey, um, earlier this year, um, we,
• 57:35
  I would get emails from people, we said, Hey, I saw your survey.
• 57:39
  I mean, rural Washington state and childcare is really a problem here.
• 57:44
  And we've been trying to start a center here.
• 57:46
  But we hit roadblocks after roadblocks.
• 57:49
  And then through the survey too, was connected to a farmer in
• 57:52
  Indiana, who about three years ago, his name is Adam Madison.
• 57:57
  Um, got really tired of not good childcare options and he formed a
• 58:03
  nonprofit organization with other folks.
• 58:06
  Um, they worked really hard to find funding.
• 58:08
  They partnered with the local, um, healthcare system.
• 58:12
  Um, they went after grants and just in the last couple of months they opened
• 58:17
  their childcare center, 70 spots.
• 58:20
  Uh, they already have a wait list, but my sense is like, it, it was very hard.
• 58:25
  Right?
• 58:25
  And so in terms of what do we do about it, right?
• 58:29
  What solutions do people wanna see?
• 58:31
  I think it's the other part two, that not everybody wants, um,
• 58:35
  a childcare center solutions.
• 58:37
  And it's not, it's not realistic for a lot of rural communities
• 58:41
  'cause we don't have enough children around, um, to maintain a childcare,
• 58:46
  but like family based care, right?
• 58:47
  Like where going to someone's house is a really good solution.
• 58:51
  In particular when your work schedule is not reliable or you have long
• 58:57
  working hours, you have varying needs.
• 59:00
  Um, and I think Covid too has really impacted, um, childcare supply.
• 59:06
  Um, it, it's hard and, and there are clearly people who've been working on
• 59:10
  these issues for years, for decades.
• 59:12
  Right?
• 59:12
  Childcare advocates, uh, the bipartisan policy center, um, is a center you
• 59:17
  might have heard of, uh, out of.
• 59:20
  Um, DC that has done a lot of wonderful work on childcare for anyone, right?
• 59:24
  Not just, um, farming.
• 59:26
  Um, and it has done a lot of survey work to ask parents
• 59:29
  like, really what's going on?
• 59:31
  Um, and a, a lot of the time too, though, at the same time when we look at those
• 59:36
  childcare advocacy groups, the rural, the, the, the specific needs of rural
• 59:41
  communities might not have received as much attention and the specific needs
• 59:45
  of farmers or anyone with, um, you know, self-employed folks, I will say hasn't
• 59:51
  necessarily received a lot of attention.
• 59:53
  And so I think that some of the solutions that have been pushed
• 59:57
  forward, um, in particular around center-based care, there's been a lot
• 1:00:02
  of push in recent years when wanna understand towards more quality, uh,
• 1:00:06
  more quality gradings, um, which tends to be more of a center-based things.
• 1:00:12
  And again, that doesn't work for a lot of things.
• 1:00:14
  Uh, we've heard a lot of farm parents saying, I don't wanna send my kid to
• 1:00:19
  daycare, but if I could have someone come help me at the farm, that would be easier
• 1:00:24
  because this way I have the kids around and more so, like, we talk to people who
• 1:00:27
  say, I would have to drive 40 minutes.
• 1:00:31
  That's like so much of my day.
• 1:00:33
  Um, as far as solutions though, I know that the show won't be aired for a
• 1:00:38
  little bit, but this year is a firm bill year, um, and there's been conversations
• 1:00:44
  around, uh, childcare for the farm sector.
• 1:00:48
  The two largest organizations in the us, the American Farm Borough,
• 1:00:52
  um, and the National Farmers Union have added childcare as a priority.
• 1:00:58
  Affordable, accessible childcare is a priority in their policy
• 1:01:01
  book for the farm Bureau.
• 1:01:03
  And that's huge, right?
• 1:01:04
  Because usually those policy books are all about the farm business, right?
• 1:01:07
  Uh, what is crop insurance going to look like?
• 1:01:10
  What are, you know, the pricing structures going to look like?
• 1:01:13
  And so the fact that now there is that the childcare piece is very big, um,
• 1:01:18
  the National Rural Health Association also released their letter, um, of
• 1:01:24
  priorities for the Farm bureau that they sent to the ACT committee,
• 1:01:28
  both in the Senate and in the House.
• 1:01:30
  And they added childcare.
• 1:01:31
  Um, and actually they, um, it, it was, I, I was able to talk to 'em.
• 1:01:36
  They actually reached out to me and they said, we want to hear what we
• 1:01:41
  can do to support the farm to support farm safety, farm health and safety.
• 1:01:47
  And I showed up to the meeting with a list of five things.
• 1:01:51
  They kept two.
• 1:01:53
  I can remember it was one of those.
• 1:01:55
  But anyways, I'm seeing that because there is a bill that is drafted, um,
• 1:02:00
  that would look at using existing U S D A programs, um, and would target
• 1:02:06
  them for both physical and social infrastructure, would target them, uh, to
• 1:02:11
  childcare for childcare in rural areas.
• 1:02:13
  It's not, it's a very small.
• 1:02:17
  I, I don't, I don't wanna downplay it at all.
• 1:02:19
  Right.
• 1:02:21
  I think it will bring in infusion of resources, but will it fix the issue?
• 1:02:27
  No, but it's a starting point in the sense that we're talking about it.
• 1:02:34
  Caite: Yeah.
• 1:02:34
  And talking, I mean, obviously is, is the first step.
• 1:02:37
  And, and so much of that, I mean, I don't have to tell you, but to our
• 1:02:41
  listeners, research is the basis of a lot of these conversations, right?
• 1:02:45
  Until there's research, the type that you're doing, there's, there's
• 1:02:49
  no way to, to justify and to prove, you know, that this is a
• 1:02:55
  priority and that people need it.
• 1:02:57
  So that's a huge piece of why your work is so important.
• 1:03:01
  So you talked a bit about your current research.
• 1:03:04
  Um, what are the, the next steps that you're working on and what yeah, what,
• 1:03:09
  what are the next steps and what you come hope comes out of your work in the end.
• 1:03:12
  I know it's probably one of those things that's just ongoing.
• 1:03:16
  It roll rolls into the, the next questions, but where,
• 1:03:19
  where are you going from here?
• 1:03:22
  Florence: From here?
• 1:03:23
  Oh man.
• 1:03:25
  So this is just a small, it's not a small thing, but it's, you know, only
• 1:03:28
  one of the projects I'm working on.
• 1:03:30
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:03:30
  Another project I'm working on, um, is looking at mental health and,
• 1:03:34
  uh, what, what folks in agriculture do when they experience challenges,
• 1:03:39
  um, mental health challenges.
• 1:03:40
  Um, and it's both looking at, kind of going back to what we
• 1:03:44
  were saying a little bit ago.
• 1:03:46
  It's not only about people's decisions and what they choose to
• 1:03:49
  do, but it's also the context in which they're making those decisions.
• 1:03:52
  Um, it's about what does the community look like?
• 1:03:55
  What does access to resources look like?
• 1:03:57
  Because we can tell people all day long you need to get help, but if HAP is not
• 1:04:02
  there, then you know, where are we going?
• 1:04:05
  And so it's also about understanding how the, how the community influences
• 1:04:13
  both mental health challenges as well as response to mental health
• 1:04:17
  challenges and the community.
• 1:04:18
  We're also talking about the, the economy, the farm economy, the local community.
• 1:04:22
  What does access to healthcare look like?
• 1:04:24
  What does access, what does the community look like, right?
• 1:04:27
  What, what's the, what's the social fabric looks like?
• 1:04:30
  Is that a community where people get together when
• 1:04:33
  there is an issue of any kind?
• 1:04:35
  Um, and so it's really moving beyond a lot of the research that has been done.
• 1:04:39
  It's really focused on individuals and really about let's educate people, uh,
• 1:04:44
  let's, um, tell them what to do and change their behavior and then flt the problem.
• 1:04:48
  This project is really more about what are the big underlying structural
• 1:04:53
  issues going on, and the extent to which we're addressing these
• 1:04:57
  underlying structure solutions.
• 1:05:00
  As far as the childcare project goes, um, we have a couple
• 1:05:03
  of years left on the grant.
• 1:05:05
  We have a lot, we are still working through, um, the data analysis.
• 1:05:08
  We're about to release a research brief with the, the key findings.
• 1:05:13
  Uh, from the findings and as far as establishing it as an issue, you're
• 1:05:16
  right, Arlene, because until we have those numbers to really talk
• 1:05:20
  about it, to really show there is a problem, I think it's, it's harder.
• 1:05:25
  Right?
• 1:05:27
  Some SNP pick about the survey findings is that 75% of the people
• 1:05:31
  that we talked to, and that was 860 farmers across the country who have
• 1:05:35
  at least one kid under 1875, about 75%, 74% to be precise, said that they
• 1:05:41
  experienced a childcare challenge.
• 1:05:43
  And those childcare challenges were defined as a matter of cost, availability,
• 1:05:48
  um, distance to, um, childcare quality, as well as, um, philosophy.
• 1:05:53
  Does your value align with those of your, of the caregiver?
• 1:05:56
  75%.
• 1:05:57
  74%?
• 1:05:58
  Cost and access were the biggest issue.
• 1:06:00
  Uh, when we asked about, you know, does, we had some questions about, you
• 1:06:05
  know, how much are the children of the, in the workplace because of lack of
• 1:06:08
  alternative options, um, that was over 50% said, yeah, the kids are with me
• 1:06:13
  'cause I don't have other things to do.
• 1:06:15
  And the last thing I said about I, I wanna say is around do people
• 1:06:20
  want this to be talked about loudly and clearly When we asked, do you
• 1:06:26
  believe that the U S D A and farm organizations should represent farmers
• 1:06:31
  in national childcare policy discussion?
• 1:06:34
  76% said yes to farm organizations being involved.
• 1:06:37
  71% to Yes.
• 1:06:39
  The u ss d a.
• 1:06:40
  So if things weren't clear yet, yeah, now they are.
• 1:06:44
  Yes,
• 1:06:45
  Caite: exactly.
• 1:06:45
  And what I want to say to, and don't, yeah, don't tell us that childcare's not
• 1:06:49
  an issue that people care about because now we have the numbers to show you Yeah.
• 1:06:52
  That people want to talk about childcare.
• 1:06:56
  Florence: Yeah.
• 1:06:57
  Yeah.
• 1:06:57
  And what was interesting too is about 60% of the people who responded are
• 1:07:01
  multigenerational farmers, and the rest are first generational farmers.
• 1:07:06
  And so we also talk to like a large, you know, um, these two groups that
• 1:07:10
  have some important differences, um, when we look at other things.
• 1:07:14
  Um, and then the last thing I'll say, when we asked about solutions, we had
• 1:07:17
  a list of 1918 different solutions, and we had anything, we had kind of
• 1:07:23
  very low hanging fruit to like very like big picture solutions we had.
• 1:07:30
  Would you like more information about how to keep the kids safe
• 1:07:33
  or how to assign duties safely?
• 1:07:35
  Would you like more information about childcare options in your community?
• 1:07:39
  Um, then would you like, um, Things directly connected to childcare, like,
• 1:07:45
  um, child childcare tax credits, um, universal, um, you know, um, childcare,
• 1:07:52
  uh, the way that K two 12 schools work.
• 1:07:55
  So kind of like universal childcare.
• 1:07:57
  Um, and then we had like affordable health insurance.
• 1:08:00
  We had, um, financial assistance or we had support when people are pregnant or
• 1:08:06
  about, or when the kids were just born.
• 1:08:08
  So maternity leaves.
• 1:08:10
  Um, and then we had what is, we have, uh, transportation.
• 1:08:14
  So when we slice, when we look at the numbers, so guess what was number one
• 1:08:18
  out of the ones I listed, I, I listed the one that's top and that's a survey
• 1:08:24
  about childcare and asking what would make it easier for you to raise the
• 1:08:27
  children on the farm and grow your business, or something like that.
• 1:08:30
  Wasn't quite the question, but was healthcare
• 1:08:34
  Caite: up there?
• 1:08:36
  This is all Americans, right?
• 1:08:37
  Yeah.
• 1:08:37
  It was
• 1:08:37
  Florence: 77%.
• 1:08:38
  Yeah.
• 1:08:39
  Yeah.
• 1:08:39
  The u the us Yeah.
• 1:08:42
  We can't look at in there.
• 1:08:45
  77% said it had insurance, and we were not surprised because that came up
• 1:08:50
  a lot in the focus groups last year.
• 1:08:52
  But it, it, it goes back to the beginning of the conversation
• 1:08:56
  on how it's all connected.
• 1:08:58
  Things that are like information, those low hanging fruits kind of
• 1:09:01
  towards the bottom of the pile, really what people, we saw a lot of.
• 1:09:06
  Really what folks want is things that are actually gonna make things
• 1:09:10
  better on a day-to-day basis.
• 1:09:20
  So
• 1:09:21
  Caite: how does rural childcare at the US compare to other countries
• 1:09:25
  and what solutions are you seeing that communities are coming up with?
• 1:09:31
  I'm gonna take notes for our own local, I'm on the board
• 1:09:35
  of our community childcare and it's, it is damn frustrating.
• 1:09:40
  You know, and I know that one issue we're really seeing is that there's, people
• 1:09:45
  have been able to get better jobs, which is greater, you know, higher paying jobs,
• 1:09:50
  but when you can start at the local gas station for $18 an hour with benefits, or
• 1:09:55
  you can start at the local daycare at, you know, $14 an hour with no benefits, plus
• 1:10:01
  you have to wipe snotty noses all day.
• 1:10:04
  Um, not a lot of people wanna do that.
• 1:10:07
  And I mean, understandably, but it's, uh, and there's, I'm really
• 1:10:14
  hoping you have some genius suggestions from someplace for us when
• 1:10:17
  Florence: I was an attorney to Arlene first, but I was gonna say they're not,
• 1:10:21
  they are parallels with agriculture where we say there is a lot of challenges
• 1:10:26
  finding recruiting labor to work on farms.
• 1:10:30
  And again, when you look at, I think the pays is different, right?
• 1:10:32
  There are some places where where the pays are higher, there are some commodities
• 1:10:36
  that, that pay higher, but a lot of the time don't come with benefits.
• 1:10:40
  Very long hours, hard work, hard physical work.
• 1:10:45
  There are similarities too, in the sense that while you can go work,
• 1:10:48
  McDonald's came, McDonald's and Target came up all the time when
• 1:10:52
  I was work, talking to childcare.
• 1:10:54
  Um, folks who work in the childcare sector, they're like, we can't
• 1:10:57
  compete with McDonald's and Target.
• 1:10:59
  Um, but um, yeah.
• 1:11:02
  Arlene, what does Canada do?
• 1:11:05
  Caite: Well, I'm also on the board of our, uh, local childcare agency.
• 1:11:09
  And, um, the one program that our agency runs is licensed home childcare.
• 1:11:14
  So like you were talking about, um, centers in people's homes.
• 1:11:19
  Um, so there are also a lot of government programs that for subsidizing,
• 1:11:27
  um, subsidizing on the individual level, so people who are low income
• 1:11:31
  to subsidize their childcare rates as well as subsidizing programs.
• 1:11:35
  Um, so there, there is money from, from the government that
• 1:11:39
  goes into those programs and.
• 1:11:41
  Across the country.
• 1:11:42
  I know they're working on a national childcare strategy.
• 1:11:45
  The, the goal is to have $10 a day childcare for children preschool age.
• 1:11:51
  Um, so that's rolling out, it's not gonna be universal in the sense that, you know,
• 1:11:57
  there just aren't there, there aren't the spaces, but, but it's happening.
• 1:12:01
  It already has been happening in some places, but that requires a
• 1:12:04
  lot, a lot of taxpayer dollars.
• 1:12:06
  There's no, no way around that.
• 1:12:08
  Um, universal, um, in our, in our jurisdiction, it's universal full day
• 1:12:15
  kindergarten from age, well, it depends where, when your child's birthday is,
• 1:12:19
  but junior kindergarten and senior kindergarten, so the year a child turns
• 1:12:22
  four and the year a child, child turns five, um, there's full day everyday
• 1:12:27
  kindergarten across the province.
• 1:12:30
  Now that is good in a lot of ways, but the, the one thing that did
• 1:12:33
  happen is that took a lot of early childhood educators out of private
• 1:12:37
  daycares and childcare centers and move them into the education system.
• 1:12:42
  Um, because they can make more, and I mean, these are
• 1:12:45
  also trained professionals.
• 1:12:46
  I mean, we want, especially in, in center-based care and in in home
• 1:12:51
  care as well, we want people who are experienced in child development and,
• 1:12:54
  and how to look after children in the best way to interact with them,
• 1:12:58
  to educate them, all those things.
• 1:12:59
  And that's, that's, that takes skill and training and education for the,
• 1:13:04
  for the people doing that work.
• 1:13:05
  So, so, Our kindergarten programs are run by both a teacher and an early childhood
• 1:13:11
  education educator in the classroom together for those JK and SSK years.
• 1:13:16
  So those are some of the, the Canadian things.
• 1:13:18
  I mean, there's still lots of gaps, um, in rural areas in in particular, but
• 1:13:23
  I do feel like licensed home childcare is a, is a great way to, to offer care
• 1:13:28
  in places and also provide economic opportunities for people who don't have
• 1:13:34
  other options, who want to be able to keep their own kids at home potentially.
• 1:13:37
  I mean, you can, you have to count your own kids towards your ratios,
• 1:13:41
  but, um, you can, you can stay home with your own children and, and take
• 1:13:45
  a couple more kids in and that could supplement, supplement your income.
• 1:13:48
  It's something that someone could do on farm, you know, like with
• 1:13:52
  the proper safety protocols.
• 1:13:53
  You have to have fenced yards and all of that kind of stuff.
• 1:13:56
  But it's things that people could, could bring more income into
• 1:14:00
  the, into the family in a rural area and not have to leave home.
• 1:14:04
  So those are some of the ways that, that it's happening here.
• 1:14:10
  Arlene, I'm gonna interject it.
• 1:14:11
  It seems like there's such a parallel to between childcare and farming being
• 1:14:16
  undervalued that it's, you know mm-hmm.
• 1:14:19
  Because they've both been sort of silent work that somebody else did, and then
• 1:14:24
  the benefits show up somewhere else.
• 1:14:27
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:14:28
  You know that honestly, as a parent, I don't want.
• 1:14:32
  The center, my kids go to employing people who'd rather be working at McDonald's.
• 1:14:37
  I want them employing people who are passionate and excited and are
• 1:14:42
  getting education and want to be there.
• 1:14:44
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:14:44
  You know, don't, 'cause they are teachers, just 'cause they're looking after
• 1:14:47
  babies doesn't mean they're not Yeah.
• 1:14:48
  They're not still teachers.
• 1:14:50
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:14:51
  I am astounded at the stuff my kids have learned at daycare and other
• 1:14:55
  than, uh, the drawing of the pooping mermaid that my kid brought home the
• 1:14:58
  other day and I, she didn't learn, she didn't learn it from the daycare stat.
• 1:15:03
  Was it a good drawing though?
• 1:15:05
  I mean, another child, it was a great drawing.
• 1:15:07
  Yeah.
• 1:15:07
  See, she still learn, but she has learned at daycare.
• 1:15:09
  There you go.
• 1:15:09
  And, you know, my kids loved daycare and they love preschool, which is
• 1:15:14
  also run by our daycare center.
• 1:15:16
  And they're learning so much and they're getting to be such members
• 1:15:21
  of the community and there is no value high enough to place on that.
• 1:15:28
  And so I think we really have to change the whole way we discuss it because if
• 1:15:35
  your children aren't the top priority in the community, and I mean for the
• 1:15:39
  whole community, not just for the parents, but they should be the highest
• 1:15:44
  priority and that's they're the future.
• 1:15:49
  Florence: Yeah.
• 1:15:50
  Yeah.
• 1:15:50
  Yeah.
• 1:15:51
  Um, I.
• 1:15:52
  You know that that question of how do countries do it is, is
• 1:15:55
  one of my research interest.
• 1:15:57
  Um, some of my dissertation research actually looked at social policies
• 1:16:02
  for France, in France and in the US for the agricultural sector and the
• 1:16:06
  ways in which social policy has been tailored or not tailored for the
• 1:16:11
  particular needs of the pharma sector.
• 1:16:13
  Um, France was a, a very easy choice in the sense that I grew up there, but
• 1:16:17
  France stands out as a country, it's not the only one, but stands out as a
• 1:16:20
  country that, uh, from very early on, uh, you know, in the 19th, 20th century
• 1:16:28
  as it was developing its social safety nets, really work to adapt it to the
• 1:16:34
  specific needs of the farm sector.
• 1:16:36
  And, and it does so with other occupational groups and saying that, um,
• 1:16:41
  the idea is that we want, as a society, we want people that have access to,
• 1:16:47
  um, we want a system that's equitable.
• 1:16:50
  So that might not be equal 'cause that might not make sense.
• 1:16:52
  So in terms of family benefits, what does that look like in France?
• 1:16:57
  Um, if you are going to have a baby or adopt a baby, um, you
• 1:17:02
  are eligible for parent to leave.
• 1:17:04
  Um, and over the years too, it's moved from.
• 1:17:07
  Being for women only to being also for the dad.
• 1:17:11
  Um, and other, you know, and it's very similar models in, in other countries
• 1:17:15
  like Nordic, Nordic, European countries, um, Spain, uh, but essentially for
• 1:17:20
  the farm sector, what it says is that, well, if you have a farm, um,
• 1:17:26
  the animals still need to be fed.
• 1:17:29
  Even if you are, you know, gonna have, you know, a baby.
• 1:17:32
  Uh, the crops still need to be tended.
• 1:17:34
  Like you cannot put your business on hold.
• 1:17:37
  Maybe some people kind can, but most people cannot put
• 1:17:40
  their farm business on hold.
• 1:17:41
  So instead of getting, um, you know, paid, you know, if, if you are a
• 1:17:46
  salaried worker, what you'll get, um, you will get your, um, you know,
• 1:17:52
  your, your salary paid for as your maternity leave or paternity leave.
• 1:17:56
  What it does in France is for the, the farm sector, um, it pays
• 1:18:00
  for a temp farmer, essentially.
• 1:18:02
  It's like, or think of it as a substitute teacher model.
• 1:18:05
  And at the national level, Finland also has an interesting model as a,
• 1:18:09
  at a national model at the national.
• 1:18:13
  National level.
• 1:18:14
  You have different, each region I guess has their own system, but it's
• 1:18:17
  connected to the national model.
• 1:18:19
  Um, and they have this system of people or of a pool of people who are
• 1:18:24
  experienced working in agriculture.
• 1:18:25
  So that could be retired farmers.
• 1:18:27
  That could be farmers who have a small farm, that they have extra
• 1:18:30
  time to work on other farms.
• 1:18:32
  Um, that can also be students, um, who are, um, in ag, ag colleges and ag
• 1:18:37
  technical schools who want to operate, um, their own farm at some point.
• 1:18:41
  Um, and essentially what it does is those folks, um, could work on
• 1:18:45
  the farm for a while, um, so that, you know, the, the parents can
• 1:18:49
  have time to be with the children.
• 1:18:51
  A a lot of the family benefits too.
• 1:18:53
  I think Arlene, you talked about it a little bit or, or long enough to, so
• 1:18:58
  that, you know, even in the US even if you, um, are eligible for, uh,
• 1:19:03
  F L M A A, um, f Ss l m a, sorry, I never remember the, the family leave.
• 1:19:08
  Um, it's very short and it's not paid.
• 1:19:11
  And you, you have to take, you know, use p t o.
• 1:19:13
  Um, and also the, the big difference too in France is kindergarten starts two and
• 1:19:19
  a half or three years old, so it's much sooner than the US so you also have access
• 1:19:24
  to that day long or half day, um, school.
• 1:19:27
  Um, and as far as childcare, um, It's a lot of, um, different options.
• 1:19:34
  Um, center care, but also family based care is really important.
• 1:19:38
  That's what my mom did.
• 1:19:39
  Um, and parents get financial support, um, to pay for it.
• 1:19:44
  Um, I don't think that care that childcare providers and friends
• 1:19:48
  are getting rich, um, by any means.
• 1:19:50
  It's not an occupation that pays a whole lot.
• 1:19:53
  But I do think, you know, thinking about my own experience, you know, and
• 1:19:57
  my mom, uh, she, it, it also didn't feel like she was way underpaid.
• 1:20:04
  Um, but the idea too is we know that parents cannot pay
• 1:20:10
  the full cost of childcare.
• 1:20:11
  Um, you know, it, it is that weird thing, right?
• 1:20:14
  And as a society, um, France is one of those countries that has decided that
• 1:20:19
  ensuring that children are well educated, well taken care of is a priority.
• 1:20:24
  Um, and so resources are made available.
• 1:20:31
  And again, not a perfect model.
• 1:20:33
  Um, are the taxes higher, uh, actually compared the rates in the
• 1:20:38
  US and France, uh, for payroll taxes?
• 1:20:41
  Is it higher?
• 1:20:43
  Yes, but not that much higher.
• 1:20:47
  And when you start thinking about what people get for the taxes that they
• 1:20:50
  pay versus what we pay here with our taxes and all the extra stuff that
• 1:20:55
  we have to pay, I would wager it's really similar what we end up paying.
• 1:21:01
  Um, but the level of, but we don't get the same thing.
• 1:21:06
  Caite: Yeah.
• 1:21:06
  I've always found it interesting too, that we have decided at some
• 1:21:10
  point that school is a public access.
• 1:21:14
  It's a public good.
• 1:21:15
  We don't have to pay for that, but early childhood education we do.
• 1:21:18
  And what the, I know there's probably, I'm sure there's a lot of historical
• 1:21:22
  context around, you know, women's work and women supposed to staying home,
• 1:21:27
  supposed to stay home and look after their kids, and all of those types of things.
• 1:21:30
  But the, the ways in which we have decided that school is, is a public good,
• 1:21:36
  but early childhood education is not.
• 1:21:38
  And I'm sure there's lots of, lots of context there that we don't
• 1:21:44
  actually need to get into today.
• 1:21:46
  But it's a, it's an interesting, interesting place that, that everyone
• 1:21:50
  seems to be kind of trying to figure out.
• 1:21:56
  Florence: And it's a longstanding issue right back.
• 1:21:59
  So it's back in the 1980s, um, the U S D A did a research project
• 1:22:05
  with women in Agriculture and asked them what they wanted.
• 1:22:09
  Um, childcare support with childcare was something that
• 1:22:12
  came up back in the eighties.
• 1:22:14
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:22:15
  Yeah.
• 1:22:16
  Still not here.
• 1:22:18
  So, you know, co covid is not, you know, I, I feel like there's been a lot of
• 1:22:22
  like, oh, like this is new with Covid.
• 1:22:24
  It's like, no, it is not that.
• 1:22:26
  This has been, uh, you know, when Shoshana started working on that research, that
• 1:22:30
  was way before Covid when we proposed the project that I talked about today.
• 1:22:34
  That was before Covid.
• 1:22:36
  Um, because the problems were, have been around for a long time and really,
• 1:22:42
  and, and you know, from, like, from a researcher perspective, right?
• 1:22:45
  Or when, when any of us reflects right.
• 1:22:48
  On our life and what kind of impact, if any, have we had and has it
• 1:22:52
  been positive and, and are we, um, living, um, are we going to live
• 1:22:57
  earth in, in a better place, right?
• 1:22:59
  Because of the work that we've done.
• 1:23:01
  You know, as a researcher it's really, really hard, right?
• 1:23:03
  Because in particular, if you look at social and economic issues, um, a
• 1:23:08
  lot of the time they require, um, a, a, a lot of the time, one effective
• 1:23:12
  way to fix them is through policy.
• 1:23:14
  Um, and, and policy can take yours, right?
• 1:23:18
  And so I think from that perspective, I, I was, um, Hearing someone saying,
• 1:23:23
  you know, this is an ultra marathon.
• 1:23:25
  It's not even a marathon of
• 1:23:29
  Caite: like Yeah.
• 1:23:30
  One, one step at a time.
• 1:23:32
  Right.
• 1:23:33
  Um, one of the statistics that I found in some of your research that was really
• 1:23:39
  scary and you know, sobering, was that every day in the US about 33 children are
• 1:23:44
  injured and that every three days a child dies in an agricultural related accident.
• 1:23:50
  And that 60% of ag related injuries are sustained by the children.
• 1:23:54
  You talked about the, the non-working children, you know, like our, our
• 1:23:57
  youngest and most of vulnerable.
• 1:23:59
  So I know that as parents we are probably always thinking about the dangers on
• 1:24:04
  farm, but you can you talk about what some of the, the major risk factors are, you
• 1:24:09
  know, obviously supervision being, being a big one, but, um, can you talk about
• 1:24:14
  some of the, the most critical points that we should kind of think about more?
• 1:24:20
  I mean, I don't wanna add more stress to people's lives because I feel
• 1:24:22
  like we're always, always thinking about those things, but Yeah.
• 1:24:25
  You know, on a statistical sense, what, what are the things that
• 1:24:28
  we need to be most conscious of?
• 1:24:32
  Florence: Yeah.
• 1:24:32
  Tractor.
• 1:24:33
  Tractor is a big, big one as well as ETVs.
• 1:24:36
  Um, and even buddy seats and, and, and what I'm gonna give you talk
• 1:24:41
  about now is the, is the more like.
• 1:24:45
  You know, like the, the, the recommendations by farm safety
• 1:24:47
  experts and, and what the research says that I think is a bit separate
• 1:24:52
  from the reality of what happens and what people can do, right?
• 1:24:55
  Yeah.
• 1:24:55
  Body seats are not made for children.
• 1:24:58
  Body seats are to teach someone how to drive the tractor, from what I understand.
• 1:25:02
  Um, even with a cab, um, tractors are not seen as a safe place
• 1:25:07
  because you have vibrations.
• 1:25:09
  Uh, you might have a door that gets opened by accident or, you know, the, the, you
• 1:25:14
  know, whoever's driving the tractor might need to hop off to do something, get
• 1:25:17
  back in, you know, who knows what the kids, um, might do when that happens.
• 1:25:22
  Um, and even, and the reality is in our research, you know, when we did the
• 1:25:27
  photo voice and we asked, uh, women to, to take pictures of what they do during
• 1:25:31
  the workday to keep the children safe, uh, we saw a lot of, um, baby seats.
• 1:25:37
  Uh, we saw a lot of, uh, different contractions and, and people are trying
• 1:25:41
  hard, you know, they are, they're doing their best with what they have.
• 1:25:45
  Um, we've also worked, heard that sometimes being in the cab, and
• 1:25:49
  I think Arlene, you, you alluded to that being in the cab might
• 1:25:53
  be the safest place considering what's going around the tractor.
• 1:25:57
  Um, as far as risks, dangerous, large animals, um, are
• 1:26:01
  also a big source of risk.
• 1:26:03
  Um, any kind of lagoon, any kind of hole that has any kind of liquid where
• 1:26:09
  people can drown, um, I think it's also a major, um, source of risk.
• 1:26:15
  Um, and there is also, I think, not as big of a risk, but also, you
• 1:26:19
  know, any kinds of, um, chemicals that might be around the farm that
• 1:26:23
  needs to be, you know, tightened up.
• 1:26:25
  Um, but even, you know, sometimes what we heard sometimes from, um, farmers
• 1:26:30
  who farm, um, so we heard a lot from dairy farmers, large scale row crop
• 1:26:36
  where obviously you have, you know, cows and, and tractors and implements.
• 1:26:40
  But we also heard from farmers who appear at maybe smaller
• 1:26:43
  scale, uh, vegetable farms.
• 1:26:46
  Um, and one thing that struck with me and, and I think like there's the
• 1:26:50
  sense of like, these are safer, but one thing that struck to me is this
• 1:26:53
  mom who said I had funny brought my kid for the first time in the greenhouse.
• 1:26:58
  He was a toddler who walked around within two minutes, or not even a
• 1:27:01
  minute, he had filmed this sharp stuff.
• 1:27:03
  Um, and I think it was like a hand tool or something.
• 1:27:06
  And so, um, the other thing too is we know that on some of those smaller farms in
• 1:27:11
  particular, when people are first starting off, they might buy older tractors.
• 1:27:15
  So they might not have the P T O, um, but they also might
• 1:27:19
  not have other safety features.
• 1:27:21
  Um, and you know, a lot of the reasons why folks might buy these tractors is
• 1:27:26
  because it's better the size of the tractor is better suited for the scale
• 1:27:31
  of the operation, but also it's better suited for their budget, but then it
• 1:27:35
  doesn't have the extra safety features.
• 1:27:37
  Um, and so.
• 1:27:39
  It, it, it's the tricky part, right?
• 1:27:41
  Because at the same time, if you don't have childcare, I, I think one thing we
• 1:27:45
  haven't talked about too is traditionally there's this idea that in agriculture, um,
• 1:27:52
  it, it takes a village to raise children.
• 1:27:54
  Right?
• 1:27:54
  That, that's something that is commonly said in agriculture and outside.
• 1:27:58
  Um, we've heard from folks, uh, from many folks who have a wonderful
• 1:28:02
  village to help them who have parents, grandparents, neighbors,
• 1:28:06
  friends, um, who are there to help.
• 1:28:08
  We've heard folks who don't have that support.
• 1:28:10
  Uh, we heard folks who said that, um, they were really hoping that
• 1:28:15
  their mom will help with childcare, uh, but they're still working.
• 1:28:20
  They need to work or they have a health condition that make
• 1:28:23
  it, that they can't do it.
• 1:28:25
  We heard from countless women that would talk about how they don't trust
• 1:28:28
  their father and all or their fathers because they felt that they were very
• 1:28:32
  unsafe and that they would do things that they're not comfortable with.
• 1:28:37
  Right.
• 1:28:37
  Um, and we also heard from folks that are first generation farmers
• 1:28:41
  who moved to a new area to buy land.
• 1:28:43
  Um, and then they don't have family to have them.
• 1:28:46
  And so it's also like that idea of like, oh, you know, people have,
• 1:28:50
  you know, family to have them.
• 1:28:52
  Not everyone, not everyone trusts their family.
• 1:28:55
  Um, families can have a lot of drama associated to it, and it might be very
• 1:29:00
  uncomfortable to, to talk about it.
• 1:29:03
  Um, it's.
• 1:29:04
  There's a stigma too around it.
• 1:29:06
  Right?
• 1:29:07
  And so I think childcare from the perspective is that's the,
• 1:29:12
  it it's also why it's important to have alternative solutions.
• 1:29:14
  Because not everyone, I mean we, um, it's a story, it's a story that
• 1:29:19
  Shoshana heard from a women years ago who said that, um, the, the, her
• 1:29:24
  kid had, she comes back to the house.
• 1:29:27
  The, the kid had been with her mom.
• 1:29:29
  She came to realize that her mom hadn't changed the diaper in six hours and came
• 1:29:33
  to realize that her mom had a resign.
• 1:29:35
  Um, but also that she don't have other choice, but that having her
• 1:29:39
  mom continue to look after her.
• 1:29:41
  And so there is like, also like, sure there is family around, but are they
• 1:29:46
  able or willing, I mean, the other thing too is we heard of, um, women
• 1:29:51
  who would say, my parents want to have nothing to do with the kids.
• 1:29:54
  They spend their entire career working really hard.
• 1:29:58
  They raise their own kids and now they want to go, uh, they wanna be snowbirds.
• 1:30:03
  Um, and they don't wanna have to do anything with the kids, or they don't
• 1:30:07
  wanna be the primary caregivers.
• 1:30:09
  And so it's also like kind of the idea that there's like all
• 1:30:12
  these different things going on that we often don't talk about.
• 1:30:16
  Um, a lot of people don't wanna admit it, right?
• 1:30:18
  Because it's, it's kind of looked down upon, um, because we're expected
• 1:30:23
  to have these great families where everyone is there to have each other.
• 1:30:27
  Yeah.
• 1:30:27
  Caite: It's so true.
• 1:30:27
  And it's a, it's again, expecting that free labor out of.
• 1:30:32
  I mean, primarily women.
• 1:30:34
  Yeah.
• 1:30:34
  Even into their senior years, that we would expect grandmothers to just
• 1:30:38
  willingly continue to give and give and give and take care of young children
• 1:30:44
  more than full time for no pay.
• 1:30:47
  Right.
• 1:30:48
  You know what, why is this an expectation or, or a, uh, that we,
• 1:30:53
  that we hold this up as a virtue even that, that this is something that,
• 1:30:58
  that is, is the best for everyone.
• 1:31:00
  You know, who is it best for?
• 1:31:02
  Probably nobody.
• 1:31:03
  I mean, if, if grandma would like to take care of the children, that's fantastic.
• 1:31:07
  But, but yeah.
• 1:31:08
  That expectation that this is, this is how it should be, or that this is,
• 1:31:13
  this is the best, the best scenario.
• 1:31:16
  I mean, we, we shouldn't expect that of people.
• 1:31:21
  Florence: Well, and also you have the, the sandwich generation, right?
• 1:31:24
  Where folks in their middle year might be lacking after the kids, but they might
• 1:31:29
  also be looking after an older parents.
• 1:31:31
  So we asked the question in the survey and we found, um, 17% said, or 2017
• 1:31:36
  said that they are, take caring for both young, young kids as, as well as adults.
• 1:31:43
  I
• 1:31:43
  Caite: think too, and I'm, I'm gonna guess this is not just our
• 1:31:47
  family, that the impact on the dynamic, I would guess between
• 1:31:53
  daughters and fathers, but especially daughters-in-law and fathers in-law.
• 1:31:59
  Uh, what happens on the farm to keep kids safe And, you know, like my father-in-law
• 1:32:06
  farms with us and he's losing his vision and he's losing his hearing.
• 1:32:12
  And on the one hand, I'm definitely not gonna tell him that he can't farm
• 1:32:19
  here or he can't drive a tractor, you know, 'cause A, it's not gonna happen.
• 1:32:22
  And b, I'd be outta the family real quick.
• 1:32:26
  But b I mean, we need the help.
• 1:32:28
  We can't turn away the labor, but it, it does make me even more nervous to
• 1:32:34
  have my kids out in the yard because I know that his vision is hearing,
• 1:32:38
  his reaction time is impaired.
• 1:32:41
  And two arguments like how old a kid has to be before they can
• 1:32:46
  be on an open station tractor.
• 1:32:47
  I mean, the cab certainly isn't the safest place, but it's gotta be
• 1:32:52
  safer than the seat of a 70 year old tractor with no rollover protection
• 1:32:58
  and no protection on a P t o.
• 1:33:00
  And you know, like we had a neighbor kid who almost killed his dad throwing
• 1:33:04
  a tractor into gear to, to drive it through a gate to help his daddy out
• 1:33:07
  when he was like four and a half.
• 1:33:10
  And, you know, my, my five-year-old is sure that he can drive the
• 1:33:13
  car now because he's five.
• 1:33:14
  So, you know, between the older farmers who are less safe and uh, the real
• 1:33:21
  young farmers who aren't safe, Because both of them think that they're capable
• 1:33:25
  of a lot more than they safely are.
• 1:33:28
  I guess that's maybe the issue is that both of them have much higher,
• 1:33:33
  uh, ideals of what their abilities are than is really uh, yeah.
• 1:33:40
  Florence: Accurate.
• 1:33:41
  Yeah.
• 1:33:42
  Yeah.
• 1:33:43
  And that we've heard that too.
• 1:33:45
  Yeah.
• 1:33:45
  Sorry.
• 1:33:46
  I was gonna say, we've heard that too a lot from parents saying their kids love
• 1:33:51
  the farm and in particular the little boys are like attracted to the heavy machinery.
• 1:33:57
  And the, the struggle of like putting the kids away from these like
• 1:34:02
  dangerous things, like was really was hard, like, was an extra challenge.
• 1:34:07
  It, it was almost, if felt like it was almost easier to have a kid who was like,
• 1:34:11
  I want not have nothing to do with this.
• 1:34:13
  Easier in some ways in the sense that they're not getting
• 1:34:16
  close to the dangerous stuff.
• 1:34:17
  Harder in the sense that it's hard to bring them along and, um, you know, so
• 1:34:22
  yeah, no kids are, no one kid are the
• 1:34:25
  Caite: same.
• 1:34:26
  I absolutely feel that, you know, my kids have days where all they want
• 1:34:29
  is to watch TV and eat fruit snacks.
• 1:34:32
  And as much as I hate that, at least I know where they are and they're not
• 1:34:36
  gonna get run over sitting on the couch.
• 1:34:38
  You know, the, as much as I love having them out farming with us, some part
• 1:34:43
  of me sees 'em come out the door and is just like, today's probably the
• 1:34:47
  day that they're gonna get run over.
• 1:34:48
  You know, this is definitely the day that they're gonna get attacked by
• 1:34:52
  a rooster and one of their eyes is gonna get poked out or some, you know,
• 1:34:56
  something horrible is gonna happen.
• 1:34:57
  And I, I hate having that feeling of just, you know, what can I do to let
• 1:35:04
  them be farm kids in the most, not dangerous to their health kind of way.
• 1:35:12
  And to this feeling like we can only prioritize their safety for like, things
• 1:35:18
  that will actually kill them and not, you know, like I definitely don't feel
• 1:35:22
  like I have the resources to like protect their emotional health on the farm.
• 1:35:27
  You know, I'm like, you didn't get run over.
• 1:35:29
  I feel good about that.
• 1:35:30
  You know, like where any injury that's not like permanently disabling
• 1:35:37
  is seen as kind of a, well we got lucky, you know, nobody died.
• 1:35:42
  Um, it would be nice to have some wiggle room and feel like we could
• 1:35:48
  prevent, you know, hearing damage or orthopedic damage or whatever and not
• 1:35:54
  just be trying to keep our kids alive.
• 1:35:56
  Um, yeah, so I guess that that leads real nicely into asking how we shift this
• 1:36:05
  discussion of responsibility and fault for accidents because it feels so much like,
• 1:36:10
  I mean, I don't know any farmers who don't at least know somebody who was killed.
• 1:36:15
  I.
• 1:36:15
  In an accident.
• 1:36:16
  And it feels so much like every accident.
• 1:36:18
  The first thing you hear is, well, what were they doing?
• 1:36:22
  Like, you know, what, what mistake did they make that caused this to happen?
• 1:36:27
  And uh, the more strange an accident is, the easier it is to write it off as well.
• 1:36:34
  That could never happen to me.
• 1:36:36
  But, you know, I know the people who were killed and the people whose
• 1:36:40
  children were killed didn't, you know, go, oh, this is probably a
• 1:36:44
  horrible, dangerous thing to do, but we're gonna let our kids do it anyway.
• 1:36:47
  'cause they'll be fine.
• 1:36:50
  You know, I mean, I assume that nobody thinks it's going to happen to them, but
• 1:36:54
  it seems like we skip so much discussion of how to be safer if we never admit
• 1:37:01
  that it, you know, the only thing keeping us safe is good luck on a lot of
• 1:37:08
  things, which isn't great to talk about.
• 1:37:12
  But, um, I guess I'm, yeah,
• 1:37:17
  Florence: it's, it, it's, you know, it's interesting.
• 1:37:21
  It, it's, it's a tricky one, one that, you know, I don't think about as much
• 1:37:27
  'cause I spend so much time looking at what, what are the things, you know, kind
• 1:37:33
  of like what are the bigger challenges and less about how people process it.
• 1:37:37
  I, I do have some of the colleagues at the National Children Center.
• 1:37:42
  Think more in terms of, you know, how do people, how do farm parents
• 1:37:47
  kind of make those decisions?
• 1:37:48
  And, and, um, justify is not the right word, but like the, what's
• 1:37:53
  the mentor model that people use?
• 1:37:56
  Um, one of my colleagues too.
• 1:37:59
  Um, some colleagues are looking at, you know, it, it's not an accident, it's an
• 1:38:03
  incident from the perspective that in risk management everything is predictable.
• 1:38:10
  Um, the thing is, I'm not sure at, at the end of the day, what difference
• 1:38:17
  does it make if we're not addressing the structural level issues?
• 1:38:23
  Is it to say that if we made it, I guess the, the, the question
• 1:38:29
  is, is it to say that countries with better support for childcare
• 1:38:34
  have less incident, um, on farms?
• 1:38:38
  Um, I don't think that we actually have very good data on that.
• 1:38:42
  I think anecdotally that yes, there are less, uh, less incidents.
• 1:38:47
  I think that also gets us into laws.
• 1:38:49
  Um, and I know that it's a very, very prickly topic, but they are
• 1:38:55
  laws around you are not allowed to have a kid on a construction site,
• 1:39:02
  but yet you can have, uh, children.
• 1:39:06
  On dangerous work site.
• 1:39:08
  Um, and even some states are rolling back on child labor laws.
• 1:39:12
  Um, and, and we're, and, and so I think those are like very murky discussions.
• 1:39:19
  Emotions run high very quickly, but it does bring up questions are around Sure.
• 1:39:26
  Kids be there in the first place.
• 1:39:28
  I, I don't know, like to me it, it's super tricky, right?
• 1:39:35
  Um, because if you run a restaurant, you, you do see
• 1:39:39
  sometimes the kids around, right?
• 1:39:41
  Because same thing like those, you know, if, if folks have the restaurant open for
• 1:39:45
  dinner, childcare is not gonna be open.
• 1:39:47
  So the kids are around until they go to, until they go to bed.
• 1:39:50
  Um, yeah, I don't know.
• 1:39:53
  Arlene, what do you think?
• 1:40:04
  Caite: You're muted.
• 1:40:07
  Sorry.
• 1:40:08
  Yeah.
• 1:40:08
  I don't know why I was having trouble unmuting there.
• 1:40:11
  I I do like what you said there about it being an incident.
• 1:40:16
  You know, the, the fact that it happened, it, it doesn't matter so, so much about,
• 1:40:25
  I I think it's part of human nature.
• 1:40:27
  Katie, when, when you're talking about, about trying to.
• 1:40:31
  To explain away someone else's accident.
• 1:40:33
  That's just the, yeah, the, the mental gymnastics of like, well, I don't do that
• 1:40:37
  specific thing, so I'm gonna be all right.
• 1:40:40
  We, we want to convince ourselves that someone else's accident was their
• 1:40:44
  fault, because then we can kind of justify the fact that we haven't gotten
• 1:40:51
  hurt by saying we're doing it right.
• 1:40:54
  And I don't think there, there is a, a, a right way necessarily.
• 1:40:59
  I mean, there's definitely some wrong ways.
• 1:41:01
  And like you, like you said, Florence, it, it is really hard to, to come
• 1:41:04
  up with hard and fast rules because agriculture is, is an industry that
• 1:41:08
  is, is difficult to, to regulate.
• 1:41:11
  There's a lot of cultural and historic, you know, expectations around what we do.
• 1:41:18
  But, but I do feel like we, we do need to, to acknowledge the gray area
• 1:41:27
  because like, even when you talked about at the beginning, so much of our,
• 1:41:30
  our farm literature, farm programming is around, this is a wonderful,
• 1:41:37
  beautiful way to raise a family.
• 1:41:39
  But it doesn't, doesn't acknowledge, like we said at the beginning, doesn't
• 1:41:43
  acknowledge that these are work sites and there are so many risk factors and
• 1:41:48
  that we need, there needs to be more support on an individual basis and that
• 1:41:54
  has to come from systematic change.
• 1:41:57
  But, but farmers need.
• 1:41:59
  Supports in a variety of ways, in creative ways.
• 1:42:03
  Um, you know, maybe it has to come in the, in the form of creating things
• 1:42:09
  like, you know, I mean, everyone we know, everyone's using buddy seats for
• 1:42:12
  kids, so let's acknowledge that and maybe put some harnesses in there so
• 1:42:17
  that we can safely attach a car seat.
• 1:42:19
  So we're not going into Facebook groups and saying, how are you
• 1:42:22
  tethering your kid into this tractor because I need to do it instead.
• 1:42:27
  Maybe coming up with conversion so that we can say, yeah, you know, you
• 1:42:32
  know, these, these are the risks.
• 1:42:33
  Same as a vehicle.
• 1:42:34
  I mean, when we drive around, we know there's risks every day.
• 1:42:36
  We could get in a car accident, our kids could get hurt, but at least if we
• 1:42:40
  could have tether straps and have our kids properly secured in a tractor, then
• 1:42:44
  we could feel at least for a few hours that they were in a safe place and that
• 1:42:48
  we weren't just jimmying something up to make something pass to acknowledge
• 1:42:54
  the realities of the way people are actually living instead of just having,
• 1:42:59
  this isn't safe and so don't do it.
• 1:43:02
  To, to change the conversation into this is the reality and let's talk about how
• 1:43:08
  to actually make things work for people.
• 1:43:11
  I, Arlene, I think that's a great point because honestly, I
• 1:43:16
  had no idea that body seats were specifically dangerous for children.
• 1:43:23
  You know, I mean, Everyone we know throws a buddy seat in her
• 1:43:27
  tractor and puts the kid on it.
• 1:43:29
  You know, it's, it's when you graduate from sleeping on the window, well behind
• 1:43:33
  the seat to being able to stay awake long enough to, to sit next to somebody.
• 1:43:39
  And I think as a parent, I would love to see, you know, what age is relatively
• 1:43:46
  safe enough to ride on a tractor?
• 1:43:49
  What age is relatively safe enough to drive a tractor?
• 1:43:52
  What age is, you know, because I get so much pushback and I know
• 1:43:57
  a lot of other parents do as well for, you know, well I was driving
• 1:44:01
  a tractor by the time I was six.
• 1:44:03
  Like, cool.
• 1:44:04
  Was it a good idea?
• 1:44:05
  Probably not.
• 1:44:06
  You know, you live to tell the tail.
• 1:44:08
  That doesn't mean it was an okay thing to, you know, it's the same
• 1:44:11
  conversation that comes up around seat belts and bikes without helmets.
• 1:44:16
  Well, I survived, so it's okay.
• 1:44:18
  Sure you did.
• 1:44:19
  You're alive to tell the story, right?
• 1:44:20
  Same thing.
• 1:44:21
  But does it mean that everyone survived?
• 1:44:24
  No.
• 1:44:24
  That's why those safety things were brought into effect is because we
• 1:44:29
  need seat belts and cars because people fly through windshields because
• 1:44:32
  the people who didn't survive don't get to live and say it was fine
• 1:44:35
  because, you know, because they died.
• 1:44:38
  So let's be, yeah, let's be honest about the risks and actually take a
• 1:44:41
  look at some of the ways that people are actually living and try and address those
• 1:44:46
  in a way that that works for people.
• 1:44:51
  Well, and I think yeah, to your, sorry.
• 1:44:53
  When we're talking about farming, you know, so much of learning how to
• 1:44:57
  farm is done as children by doing it.
• 1:45:01
  And it's not reasonable to say that, you know, kids won't set foot on the farm
• 1:45:07
  until after they graduate high school.
• 1:45:09
  But what are the, what are sort of the boundaries for safe ages to do different
• 1:45:17
  things, you know, at, at three, is it safe to be around chickens at eight?
• 1:45:21
  It's safe to be around cattle.
• 1:45:22
  Like, it would be nice to have more guidelines for these things because we
• 1:45:29
  get so many guidelines for, you know, what car seat our kid should be in.
• 1:45:32
  But yeah, I've never seen anything about, you know, how to safely
• 1:45:37
  mount a car seat in the tractor.
• 1:45:39
  And I mean, people do it, so we should give them safer.
• 1:45:42
  We might not
• 1:45:43
  Florence: find
• 1:45:43
  Caite: that because they no, yet it doesn't exist.
• 1:45:45
  Um, some information about it.
• 1:45:48
  Florence: Yeah.
• 1:45:48
  So a a couple of things to your point about the, the car seat.
• 1:45:52
  I mean, we saw so many pictures.
• 1:45:54
  We, we received about 300 different pictures from people and we saw
• 1:45:57
  so many contraptions on tractors.
• 1:45:59
  And, and from talking with my farm safety colleagues, I knew like
• 1:46:03
  that is not supposed to be done.
• 1:46:05
  And, um, I think too, from the, the equipment manufacturer's perspective,
• 1:46:11
  it's a liability issue, right.
• 1:46:13
  And.
• 1:46:13
  It, it could, but the thing is like, I think your conversation, the, the
• 1:46:17
  point you're making around cars and, and car seats and, and seat belts, right?
• 1:46:20
  Like, we still know we could get killed.
• 1:46:23
  Uh, but yet we still have them.
• 1:46:25
  Um, I think that's a really interesting conversation to have.
• 1:46:29
  Um, we, I did have a conversation last year with a, a colleague who's
• 1:46:33
  an ag engineer, and I was talking to her about some of the things that we
• 1:46:37
  were hearing that people want, right?
• 1:46:38
  And our conversation didn't go very far, but it's, it certainly we heard
• 1:46:42
  people were saying like, I wish equipment manufacturers would do X, Y,
• 1:46:45
  and Z because it make my life easier.
• 1:46:48
  Um, as far as age of children, when are they ready to do different tasks?
• 1:46:52
  There are different guidelines, um, that, um, have been put together,
• 1:46:57
  uh, specifically for agriculture.
• 1:46:59
  Um, I don't know if you've seen them.
• 1:47:01
  One great resource that I'm going to plug in is cultivate safety.org.
• 1:47:06
  Um, it's run through the children center, but I also, um, get, you
• 1:47:10
  know, ask them board resources from a lot of different places.
• 1:47:13
  So there are guidelines specifically around when is a kid old enough to
• 1:47:19
  do X, Y, and Z with the understanding that each kid is different, right?
• 1:47:23
  Um, not only like emotionally, psychologically, but physically, right?
• 1:47:27
  Like not all.
• 1:47:29
  10 year olds are as tall, as heavy.
• 1:47:31
  And then the other, uh, resources that could be interesting too for
• 1:47:34
  listeners if they haven't seen them yet, are the youth working guidelines.
• 1:47:39
  Um, and I think they're being renamed, but essentially they are for a lot
• 1:47:43
  of different tasks on the farm.
• 1:47:45
  Um, when are children old enough to do them or what, what are, what
• 1:47:50
  do children need to be able to do in order to be ready for that task?
• 1:47:54
  And then how do you assign that task safely?
• 1:47:56
  What kind of equipment, uh, safety equipment do they have?
• 1:47:59
  And then how do you safely supervise children doing that task?
• 1:48:03
  Um, and it's specifically from the recognition that, um, as Katie you
• 1:48:08
  said, like it realistically you're not, the kids are not gonna wait till
• 1:48:11
  they're 18 to come into the farm yard.
• 1:48:13
  Um, and so it's to straddle kind of those things, right?
• 1:48:16
  The kids are gonna be around, the kids won't need to be involved.
• 1:48:20
  What, you know, whatever the verb is, how is that done safely?
• 1:48:23
  I think the biggest challenge that we've seen though is for those
• 1:48:26
  youngest, youngest kid who are, you know, um, too young even, you know,
• 1:48:31
  the chickens might be fine, but the rooster, is it gonna chase them?
• 1:48:35
  Yeah, exactly.
• 1:48:36
  I think it's, I used to be so scared of my grandpa's
• 1:48:38
  Caite: rooster.
• 1:48:39
  It's pretty telling that I just pulled up those guidelines and if you
• 1:48:43
  filter by ages six and under, it says zero recommended safe tasks, which,
• 1:48:51
  you know, um, is scary and it's.
• 1:48:57
  No, but this is a, a really interesting resource and we'll
• 1:49:00
  put it up on the website.
• 1:49:01
  'cause this is Arlene.
• 1:49:03
  I think your kids are gonna have some better arguments for
• 1:49:05
  getting out of some stuff now.
• 1:49:08
  Yeah.
• 1:49:08
  Maybe, you know, since your kids are old enough to want to get out stuff.
• 1:49:12
  That's right.
• 1:49:12
  My kids are only old enough to wanna get everything the spreadsheet says,
• 1:49:15
  I'm not old enough to cut the grass yet.
• 1:49:22
  Florence: Yeah.
• 1:49:22
  See, maybe keep it for yourself and like, do
• 1:49:27
  Caite: things.
• 1:49:27
  I think that's a good idea though, in terms of, I mean, we've used
• 1:49:30
  the same excuse for, you know, not letting 'em sit in the front seat.
• 1:49:33
  Right.
• 1:49:33
  It's like, well, sorry, this is the rule until you're this age,
• 1:49:37
  you know, an airbag can hurt you.
• 1:49:38
  You can't sit in the front seat of the vehicle.
• 1:49:40
  That's the rule.
• 1:49:41
  This is the age.
• 1:49:42
  But yeah, if you have those types of guidelines in front of you as a parent,
• 1:49:45
  it kind of reminds you and also gives you that justification if you need
• 1:49:48
  it, you know, with family members or whoever, or to the kids themselves to
• 1:49:52
  say, I agree that you wanna help me with this task, but this is something
• 1:49:55
  that you can't do until you're this age.
• 1:49:57
  I can give you this task to do instead.
• 1:49:59
  That's safer.
• 1:50:00
  You know, like sweeping, scraping, poop, whatever, you know, like
• 1:50:03
  the, the things that keep you, uh, away from, from animals.
• 1:50:07
  Yeah, exactly.
• 1:50:08
  Yeah, exactly.
• 1:50:09
  You know, there, there are are tasks that I can, I can create.
• 1:50:12
  Um, but yeah, the actual, the actual job descriptions can, you can kind of hold
• 1:50:18
  them off a little bit and say, yeah, that's a thing you can do when you're 12.
• 1:50:21
  But yeah.
• 1:50:22
  For now, here's the list that's that's accessible to you.
• 1:50:25
  Yep.
• 1:50:28
  Katie, do you wanna do your question?
• 1:50:31
  I think Florence, we were talking before we came on about the state
• 1:50:33
  fair, so I think she's gonna have some ideas on this one.
• 1:50:38
  Sorry.
• 1:50:39
  I was just really intrigued by the fact that the guidelines for tractor use
• 1:50:44
  involved both physical and mental and social development because yes, just
• 1:50:49
  because your kid's tall enough to drive a tractor does not mean that they're ready.
• 1:50:53
  Florence: And Yeah.
• 1:50:54
  Yeah.
• 1:50:54
  And, and you know, and, and I'm happy to, I have colleagues at the Children's
• 1:50:58
  Center that could come talk in lots and lots of details around those guidelines
• 1:51:03
  and, and how they were developed, um, you know, by psychologists and, and different
• 1:51:08
  level, different expertise that came together, um, to develop those guidelines.
• 1:51:12
  They've been revisited a few times over the years.
• 1:51:15
  Um, an interesting resource.
• 1:51:17
  Um, you know, that another important resource that could be helpful for parents
• 1:51:21
  with the youngest kid is the safe play area and how to design safe play area.
• 1:51:26
  So on cultivate safety.org, there is a booklet that we talk to people,
• 1:51:31
  you know, that talks through here are things to keep in mind as you
• 1:51:35
  put, um, you know, a safe play area.
• 1:51:37
  Um, together what we did, did hear from parents though is, is the cost of it and
• 1:51:41
  how it's not always practical given how much things tend to move on the farm.
• 1:51:46
  And you might be, you know, in one area and then the next, but your safe
• 1:51:49
  player area might be very stationary.
• 1:51:51
  Um, and so, um, but, but still lots of great, um, you know, practical
• 1:51:57
  information around, you know, what, you know how to do these things on the farm,
• 1:52:02
  um, you to, to help navigate things.
• 1:52:06
  Caite: Alright, well now that Arlene said that I should
• 1:52:10
  actually ask my question and quit.
• 1:52:13
  Thinking about how to tell the boy child that it's gonna be nine years before he is
• 1:52:17
  potentially old enough to drive a tractor.
• 1:52:19
  Uh, good luck with that.
• 1:52:21
  But, um,
• 1:52:22
  Florence: it's, it's such a short amount of time in the great scheme of things.
• 1:52:27
  Caite: He, uh, the day after his fifth birthday asked Daddy if he
• 1:52:30
  could drive the car home from town, because he's five now, so I am.
• 1:52:37
  Yeah.
• 1:52:37
  That's gonna be daddy's problem to explain to him.
• 1:52:40
  That's hilarious.
• 1:52:41
  Why He's not old enough to drive yet.
• 1:52:43
  You know, it was too, that doesn't need to be able to
• 1:52:45
  Florence: touch the pedals.
• 1:52:48
  Caite: He's a pretty tall kid.
• 1:52:49
  He'll figure it out.
• 1:52:50
  But, um, so we ask all of our guests, if you were going to dominate a
• 1:52:55
  category at the county fair and you can make one up, uh, what would it be?
• 1:53:03
  Florence: That, that's a great one.
• 1:53:05
  Um, I wouldn't be the one who grows the best looking vegetables.
• 1:53:13
  Uh, uh, jam could be one.
• 1:53:16
  I, I make a lot of jams.
• 1:53:18
  I make, um, all jams every year.
• 1:53:20
  Uh, pottery.
• 1:53:21
  I do a lot of pottery.
• 1:53:23
  It's a great de-stressor for me.
• 1:53:24
  Um, but I'm not really much of, um, I'm not a, I, yeah, I live,
• 1:53:34
  no, yeah, I probably wouldn't win.
• 1:53:35
  Caite: But those are, those are some great categories.
• 1:53:38
  A good jam is, uh, Well, maybe we could is a is always a, a plus for me.
• 1:53:46
  We could have a category of, um, throwing your own pots to put the
• 1:53:52
  jam in and then Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:53:55
  Cross the crossover category.
• 1:53:57
  Yeah.
• 1:53:57
  That would narrow it in so you wouldn't have too much competition.
• 1:54:00
  Yeah, for
• 1:54:00
  Florence: sure.
• 1:54:01
  You know, the, yeah, there's been times when I've thought about what would I do
• 1:54:06
  if I quit my job because I don't know, I feel like we mean, I, anyways, um, I've
• 1:54:13
  thought about, um, have an ice cream shop and then making the own pottery bowls.
• 1:54:19
  Um, I haven't done it so much.
• 1:54:20
  I know why, but I used to make a lot of ice cream.
• 1:54:23
  Um, it would've been nice to have a cow actually at that point.
• 1:54:26
  Uh, so yeah, that, that could be that too.
• 1:54:30
  Ice cream and bowl ice cream.
• 1:54:32
  Delicious
• 1:54:32
  Caite: with, I'll sign up to be a judge for that one.
• 1:54:36
  So we will move into our cussing and discussing segment.
• 1:54:40
  So this is where we can talk about anything from a minor pet
• 1:54:42
  peeve to major social issues.
• 1:54:44
  We've talked a lot about them already today.
• 1:54:46
  So listeners, if you want to send in your cussing and
• 1:54:50
  discussing, check the show notes.
• 1:54:52
  There's a link to our speak pipe where you can leave a voice memo
• 1:54:54
  or you can always send us an email and we will read it out for you.
• 1:54:58
  Katie, what are you cussing and discussing this week?
• 1:55:03
  I hadn't thought ahead, but I've, I've got one for this
• 1:55:06
  weird medication side effects.
• 1:55:09
  I mean, I feel like a lot of side effects are pretty like, you know,
• 1:55:13
  nausea, whatever, like you expect that it's not a weird thing, whatever.
• 1:55:18
  Do you get the weird ones?
• 1:55:19
  But I was, the medication I'm on currently, one of them, the side
• 1:55:27
  effect is premature facial aging.
• 1:55:32
  What, what is, and how do you know for sure that you're getting that symptom?
• 1:55:37
  I mean, and it's not just time.
• 1:55:39
  Well, I mean, I, yeah, I, I feel better about my face now because I'm
• 1:55:45
  like, it's a medication side effect.
• 1:55:47
  It's not just that I'm olds or that I should take better care of my skin, but
• 1:55:53
  what the hell kinda side effect is that?
• 1:55:56
  And how many people reported this in the drug trials that they were like, yeah.
• 1:56:01
  And how drastic is it?
• 1:56:02
  Is it one of those, like they took a picture at the beginning Yeah.
• 1:56:05
  And at the end of the trial and they aged like 20 years in two weeks or something.
• 1:56:08
  Or what if this is just like my normal rate of aging and then this
• 1:56:11
  side effect is gonna hit and I'm gonna like rip Van Winkle overnight
• 1:56:14
  age, like 30 to years in one night?
• 1:56:17
  Like, what is this?
• 1:56:19
  Yeah, that's.
• 1:56:20
  Or like that, that is so sweating patterns like, cool, I got rid of one illness,
• 1:56:27
  but now I'm oddly sweaty at random times.
• 1:56:30
  Like, is this really better?
• 1:56:32
  Like, and my face looks 80.
• 1:56:35
  Yeah.
• 1:56:35
  I am old and I'm sweaty.
• 1:56:37
  Great, but my asthma's better.
• 1:56:39
  So yeah, it all works out.
• 1:56:42
  How, ugh.
• 1:56:45
  Florence, what do you have to discuss and discuss this week?
• 1:56:49
  Florence: Well, I don't feel like I'm really prepared for this.
• 1:56:51
  Caite: I never am, but think it hasn't stopped me yet.
• 1:56:55
  Florence: Well, I like we, we've talked a lot about the, the social piece
• 1:56:59
  and I feel like a little pet peeve.
• 1:57:03
  I don't know.
• 1:57:05
  Arlene, how about you go in there?
• 1:57:07
  Gimme a minute.
• 1:57:08
  Yes, that's
• 1:57:08
  Caite: fine.
• 1:57:08
  I will jump in.
• 1:57:09
  'cause before we came on, we talked about that scenario where you go into
• 1:57:13
  the grocery store with like three things on your list and come out with
• 1:57:16
  hundreds of dollars worth of stuff.
• 1:57:18
  So where I live, we, they don't have plastic bags anymore.
• 1:57:22
  They've been banned.
• 1:57:23
  And so your options are, you bring in the bags that you have in your vehicle,
• 1:57:28
  which we all have, you know, like 500 of, or you go into the store with the,
• 1:57:33
  the list of three things and you say, well, I'm only getting three things.
• 1:57:35
  I don't need to bring my bags.
• 1:57:36
  And then you get to the checkout and then you either have to buy more
• 1:57:40
  reusable bags to add to your stash of hundreds in your vehicle, or you just
• 1:57:44
  toss everything back into the cart and then you look like you're shoplifting,
• 1:57:48
  but you're like reassuring the cashier.
• 1:57:49
  Like, oh no, I've got lots of bags in my car.
• 1:57:51
  So I'll just like bag it in the parking lot.
• 1:57:53
  So usually I do kind of a combination.
• 1:57:57
  I'll buy like one or two bags for the little stuff and then just like load all
• 1:58:01
  the big things, but it's so annoying.
• 1:58:03
  Or just the forgetting the bags on a regular grocery one run is super
• 1:58:09
  obnoxious too because you know you're going in for a bunch of stuff and then
• 1:58:12
  you have nothing to put it all in.
• 1:58:14
  And I'm try, I, you know, I wanna save the world too.
• 1:58:16
  But a few plastic bags would be nice once in a while for free.
• 1:58:20
  But they're not allowed illegal.
• 1:58:24
  Florence: That is, they're very much legal here.
• 1:58:29
  Caite: Yeah.
• 1:58:29
  Wisconsin has not, not, uh, jumped on that bandwagon yet.
• 1:58:33
  They
• 1:58:33
  Florence: have not with the paper straws.
• 1:58:35
  No.
• 1:58:36
  No, they have not.
• 1:58:37
  Um, man, this is a hard one because I feel like we can also
• 1:58:42
  reveal a lot about ourselves.
• 1:58:48
  Uh, I mean, I, I would say, um, the, it it's a pit beef of mine.
• 1:58:54
  Um, or, or the self-help things that are all over the place about how to help
• 1:58:59
  ourselves and like, oh, just breathe.
• 1:59:03
  And I'm like, how about let's work?
• 1:59:06
  Oh, they drive me bunkers.
• 1:59:08
  Um, they, and, and they're so to deaf a lot of the time.
• 1:59:14
  Um, one that I will give an example that was, um, you know, am I
• 1:59:20
  getting in trouble for saying that?
• 1:59:21
  But my workplace has those adult parenting posters and
• 1:59:26
  they had the penny pinching one.
• 1:59:28
  These things.
• 1:59:30
  That's my pet peeve.
• 1:59:36
  Oh, I hadn't
• 1:59:36
  Caite: thought of that.
• 1:59:38
  Yeah.
• 1:59:38
  Florence: Oh, yeah.
• 1:59:39
  They said, they said, yeah, cancel your dear membership.
• 1:59:42
  Sure.
• 1:59:44
  Right.
• 1:59:45
  That poster said, cancel your gym membership to save money.
• 1:59:48
  But the month before, they told us that we needed to go to the
• 1:59:51
  gym to take care of ourselves.
• 1:59:53
  So I was like, my brain is,
• 1:59:55
  Caite: it's what?
• 1:59:56
  Do you want more your health or your money?
• 1:59:58
  You gotta decide now.
• 2:00:02
  Florence: How about leave me alone?
• 2:00:03
  Yeah, that's right.
• 2:00:06
  Sorry, I, I might get in trouble
• 2:00:07
  Caite: for saying that that's all.
• 2:00:10
  All right.
• 2:00:11
  Thank you so much, Florence, for joining us today.
• 2:00:13
  I know we had a such a thank, great discussion.
• 2:00:16
  It was great to meet you.
• 2:00:17
  Um, if people want to learn more about your work and the center, where
• 2:00:21
  should they look online for more info?
• 2:00:24
  Florence: Yes, they should Google the National Farm Medicine Center, um,
• 2:00:29
  because if they Google that, they will find our website and it's through the
• 2:00:33
  Marshfield Clinic Research Institute.
• 2:00:35
  Um, and then, um, you know, the Children's Center too.
• 2:00:39
  They'll find the information for that center by going through the
• 2:00:42
  National Farm Medicine Center.
• 2:00:43
  We also have Twitter account, Facebook account, cultivate safety.org.
• 2:00:48
  Um, is the other website that I, um, that we talked about for a few minutes, that
• 2:00:53
  has a lot of the practical information that are really intended to have, uh,
• 2:00:59
  parents, um, navigating children and work.
• 2:01:03
  Caite: That's great.
• 2:01:03
  Yeah.
• 2:01:03
  And we'll definitely be, uh, talking to you about, uh, connecting with
• 2:01:08
  some of your colleagues as well because it feels like we could, we
• 2:01:11
  could have a lot, lot of, lot of good discussions about different
• 2:01:14
  Florence: topics.
• 2:01:16
  Yes, yes, absolutely.
• 2:01:19
  Caite: Thank you so much.
• 2:01:20
  We really appreciate your time.
• 2:01:21
  Yeah,
• 2:01:22
  Florence: thank you.
• 2:01:23
  Thanks for coming on Florence.
• 2:01:24
  Yeah, thank you.
• 2:01:28
  Caite: Thank you for joining us on Barnyard Language.
• 2:01:30
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