OGDENSBURG, Wis. — Cullen Schachtschneider, 6 years old, lay bleeding beside the barn, tangled up in a 4,600-pound farm machine that had ripped his left leg apart.
Like children across America’s two million family-run farms, Cullen had grown up around farm equipment, including the yellow loader now covered in his blood. He rode along as his father hauled calves. He watched his grade-school-age brothers drive the diesel-powered loader, carrying corn and doing chores to help keep their family’s struggling Wisconsin dairy afloat. The work was woven into their childhood.
But one evening last October, as Cullen’s father was using the loader — called a skid steer — to feed the cows, Cullen clambered aboard, and his foot slipped. The machine’s hydraulic bucket bit into Cullen’s left leg and tore it from knee to ankle, ripping off his tissue as easily as someone slipping off a glove.
The boy’s father, Caleb, jumped off the machine and frantically called 911. Two years earlier, Cullen’s brother Kholer, 8, had driven the steer into his older brother, Maric, sending him to the hospital. Now another child was hurt.
If the family business were medicine or construction, there would be little chance of a kindergartner wielding a scalpel or shingling a roof.
But here and on other family-operated farms, children as young as 5 grow up in the driver’s seat of machines many times their size, doing work that is deeply embedded in rural traditions but that also contributes to injuring thousands of children and teenagers every year and killing an estimated 100 more. Researchers say that the true number could be higher, because there are few standards on how to report and tally them all.
The toll has stirred a debate among farm safety groups and in rural communities about whether young children should be allowed to tackle such risky jobs. After a string of horrific accidents this year, intense discussions flared up on social media about when — and whether — it was safe to let children work and play around heavy equipment.
At a time when industries and some rural residents have rallied behind the Trump administration’s push to roll back an array of regulations, the debate over safety standards on family farms raises difficult questions about the line where personal responsibility should end and government oversight should begin.
“I’ve seen too many children killed,” said LuAnne Ujazdowski, a counselor at Cullen’s elementary school in central Wisconsin who has 60 beef cows at her home and calls herself “rural to the roots.”
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Farm safety advocates point to a litany of cases that saddle families with guilt and ruinous bills, and yoke their children with years of injury and painful recovery: A 3-year-old in Loyal, Wis., crushed last May by a loader being driven by his 5-year-old brother. A 6-year-old boy in Dowagiac, Mich., run over and killed last July when he fell from the bucket at the front of a skid steer. A 10-year-old boy in Kansas, who had been clearing brush when he was run over by a tractor driven by his 9-year-old sister.
“Parents in the city would not be allowed to do some of these types of things,” said Barbara Lee, director of the National Farm Medicine Center at the Marshfield Clinic in Marshfield, Wis. “You see a 4-year-old and a 5-year-old riding on a tractor fender, nobody reports it. They say, ‘That’s farming.’ ”
But questioning whether a child should be riding in a tractor or playing in the barn is no easy thing in rural communities. Generations of farm children have woken before dawn to feed livestock and do chores that families call a sacrosanct part of life. It is a way of passing on lessons about hard work, responsibility and the pulse of the land that their children will some day take over.
With prices plummeting for wheat, dairy and other products, smaller, struggling farms are also under intense financial pressure, and entire families are pitching in to survive.
“These kids help,” Cullen’s mother, Amanda Smith, said. “They are our hired hands.”
