Rural Values A Farm Kid Paradox By Casper Bendixsen Abstract Children are commonly and often fatally injured in agricultural settings that include “family farms”, constituting fully half of all working youth fatalities in the United States. Yet certain aspects of farm life that expose children to harm are also linked to positive health outcomes, a phenomenon that this essay terms “the farm kid paradox.” It reviews applied anthropological research on the differential intertwining of health and hazard, and refects on the role of the anthropologist as a broker of facts and concepts between diverse stakeholders and farm environments. Keywords: applied anthropology, workplace safety, child labor, immunology, rural culture “Family farms” are seats of social–cultural life in rural North America. Farm kids are elemental to their stories, occupying an ambiguous role within the “agrifamily system” (Bennett and Kohl 1982). While most US industries barred children as workers in the early twentieth century, farm kids were not so easily excluded from workplaces that are often also their homes. Children on farms still rise early in the morning to gather eggs, feed calves, and irrigate crops. They also still play on haystacks, swing from ropes, and ride bikes in the yard. Today, almost one million US children live on farms and over half that number report working there; an additional quarter‐million work on farms that are not their residence, from neighbor kids working summer jobs to immigrant children working alongside their parents or simply accompanying them to the felds (CDC 2014). Simply put, most farms (and not just the owner‐operated kinds most commonly glossed as “family farms”) remain places where the domains of work and home intermingle. This has profound effects on the daily lives of children in these settings. As farm production intensifed over the course of the twentieth century, new hazards evolved with the increased use of machinery and application of chemicals (Murphy 1992). Tractors, for instance, are today the leading cause of fatalities for children on farms in the United States, whether as operators, extra riders, or bystanders. Larger farms are subject to increased oversight from regulatory agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and most must provide workers’ compensa- tion insurance. But these labor protections, many of which trace their origins to industrial workplaces, do not mesh easily with more limited logics of state intervention into the home (see also Lash 2017 on how these logics play out across race and class). As a result, it is not widely recognized that children are commonly and often fatally injured in agricultural settings that include “family farms”, constituting fully half of all working youth fatalities in the United States (Perritt et al. 2017). What is the role of anthropology in confronting this issue? Earlier in my career, I wrote appre- ciatively about agrarian life and the raising of farm kids as a multigenerational ethical project of kinship, animal husbandry, and land stewardship (Bendixsen 2014). In my current role as an applied anthropologist, though, I work with agricultural communities and health and safety professionals toward the mitigation of farm hazards, including those specifc to children. My work at the National Farm Medicine Center over the past six years has challenged me to integrate these perspectives and to confront an empirical phenomenon that I call the farm kid paradox: Certain aspects of farm life that Journal for the Anthropology of North America 22.2, pp. 139–142, ISSN 2475-5389. Copyright © 2019 The Authors. Journal for the Anthropology of North America published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of American Anthropological Association. DOI: 10.1002/nad.12118 139 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.