Keeney v. Beasman

Offutt, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. Frank B. Beasman owns and operates a farm known as the “Fair Haven Farms Dairy” near Sykesville, Carroll County, Maryland. The entire farm is utilized for the production of milk, which he sells in bulk and in bottles, and distributes over a retail milk route from a truck, and in connection with it there is a 300-gallon pasteurizing plant. It contains about 600 acres of ground, of which part is in woodland, part in pasture, and the remainder in grass and grain, except for small lots used for gardens and the curtilages adjacent to dwellings occupied by the ⁵⁸⁴ owner and his tenants.

The crops grown on the farm are fed on the place, the produce of the gardens is consumed by Beasman and his employees, none of the crops are sold, and, in short, altogether it constitutes a largely self-contained and complete dairying plant. The operation and management of it requires the kind of labor ordinarily incident to the management of any farm, such as tilling the soil, planting, cultivating, and harvesting the crops, caring for the livestock, and marketing the farm products. On October 10th, 1934, Merhl Keeney, while employed by Beasman as a laborer on the farm, was engaged in removing a stump from an alfalfa field, and, in the course of his work, while attempting to make a hole under the stump in which to place dynamite, he ran a sliver of wood in his finger, causing an injury which eventually resulted in his death. His duties while employed by Beasman were principally farm duties; he was required to milk cows, cultivate crops, work on a hay wagon, drive a team; occasionally he cut hedges, washed buckets in the pasteurizing plant, did some cementing, and painted some farm implements.

On January 30th, 1935, the sworn claim for compensation of Mrs. Dorothy Keeney, the widow of Mehrl Keeney, and their two infant children, was filed with the State Industrial Accident Commission, and on February 9th it received an “Employer’s Report of Injury” signed by Beasman,.in which he described the nature and result of the accident, and stated that it had occurred in the course of Keeney’s employment, and that medical attention had been rendered. The surgeon’s report showed that such services had been engaged by the employer. A hearing on the claim was requested by the employer and insurer, and the commission, after hearing the parties, disallowed the claim, apparently on the ground that at the time of the accident Keeney was a farm laborer engaged in service incidental to, and in connection with, agricultural pursuits or developments. From that finding the claimants appealed to the Court of Common Pleas of ⁵⁸⁵ Baltimore City, where the case was heard by the court without a jury.

At the conclusion of the hearing, the court directed a verdict for the employer and insurer, and from that judgment this appeal was taken. In addition to the facts stated above, it appeared that at the time of the accident there was in force a policy of insurance issued by the Maryland Casualty Company to Beasman, having the following coverage: “Farm Labor and Dairymen: All employees of whatever nature excluding in servants engaged upon or in connection with such farm, including Drivers, Chauffeurs (no private) and their Helpers, Outservants, Occasional Outservants, also Managers, Superintendents and Foremen if engaged wholly or partly in field work;” and the insurer, in assumed compliance with the Workmen’s Compensation Law (Code, art. 101, sec. 1 et. seq., as amended) certified the insurance to the commission, and in the notice stated that the business covered by the policy was that of “Farm Labor and Dairyman.” The appeal presents two questions: (1) Was the work in which Keeney was engaged at the time of the accident farm labor within the meaning of the Workmen’s Compensation Law? and, (2) assuming that it was not, are the employer and insurer estopped from asserting that fact as a defense to appellants’ claim by the policy of insurance issued upon his application to the employer by the insurer, and certified by the insurer to the State Industrial Accident Commission as in compliance with that law? Code, art. 101, sec. 65, subsec. (3), as amended by chapter 354, Acts 1933, provides that “ ‘Employee’ * * * shall not include farm laborers. ‘Farm laborers,’ as used in this Article, shall mean any employees who, at the time of the accident, are engaged in rendering any agricultural service, including the threshing or harvesting of crops, or who, at the time of the accident, are engaged in service incidental to and in connection with agricultural pursuits or developments, whether the employer be the farmer or other person undertaking or contracting with the ⁵⁸⁶ farmer to perform any such agricultural service, pursuit or development.

This Article shall not apply to cutters of cord wood or fire wood, farm laborers, domestic servants, nor to country blacksmiths, wheelwrights or similar rural employments, unless these employments elect to come under this Article as provided in Section 33.” If the employee at the time of the accident was engaged in farm labor as defined by the act, then, by the express and explicit language of the statute, its provisions were not applicable to him. It appears from that definition that it was the purpose of the Legislature to except from its provisions employees engaged in rendering “any” service “incidental to or connected with” agricultural pursuits “or developments.” The appellants contend that the main business of the employer was dairying; that the operation of the farm was merely incidental to that business; that dairying is not farming, nor is it incidental to, or connected with, any agricultural service, pursuit, or development; that at the time of the accident the employee was not a “farm laborer,” within the definition of the statute; and that therefore its provisions were applicable to his case. The appellees assert the converse of that proposition. Literally, agri cultura means the tillage or cultivation of the soil.

But, like many words compounded of different elements, it has a meaning of its own broader than that of its elements considered separately, for from time immemorial it has been regarded as synonymous with husbandry, and includes, not only the cultivation of the soil and the raising of crops, but also “gathering in the crops and raising live stock” (Oxford Dictionary), and, as a natural concomitant of those activities, marketing the products of the soil, the increase and the products yielded by the stock, such as wool and milk. That has been so from the earliest times. Meliboeus, himself a husbandman, in the first of Virgil’s Eclogues, speaks to Tityrus, another farmer, who is going into exile, driving his herds before him, of the pleasant ploughed fields, as though the cultivation of the fields ⁵⁸⁷ and the management of herds were branches of the same business, and in the first book of the Georgies, which was written for the rehabilitation of agriculture in Italy, the care and management of cattle is treated as a branch of agriculture, and Anthon stated that Virgil’s rules concerning the care of cattle were taken from the works of the “ancient agricultural writers of his own country.” In the Oxford Dictionary it is said that the restriction of the word to tillage alone is rare. In Rawle’s Edition of Bowner’s Law Dictionary this definition is given: “The cultivation of soil for food products or any other useful or valuable growths of the field or garden; tillage, husbandry; also, by extension, farming, including any industry practised by a cultivator of the soil in connection with such cultivation, as breeding and rearing of stock, dairying,” etc. In Philadelphia v. Davis, 6 Watts & S.

(Pa.) 269, 279, “farm products” were held to be “swine, horses, neat cattle, sheep, manure, cordwood, hay,” as well as “vegetables, fruit, eggs, milk, butter, lard, and other provisions for the mouth.” In Davis v. Industrial Commission, 59 Utah, 607 , 206 P. 267, 268 , a sheep herder was held to be an “agricultural laborer.” In State ex rel. Brittain v. Hayes, 143 La. 39 , 78 So. 143 , it was held that a farmer who goes from place to place selling at retail the products of his farm is only pursuing the business or occupation of a farmer. In Hill v. Georgia Casualty Co. (Tex. Com.

App.) 45 S. W. (2nd) 566, 567 , it was held that one employed at a nursery for the propagation of trees, vines, shrubs, etc., was an agricultural laborer, and in Greischar v. St. Mary’s College, 176 Minn. 100 , 222 N. W. 525 , 526 it was held that milking cows and plowing the fields on a dairy farm must “be considered the work of a farm laborer just the same as would be the same work upon any other sort of a farm.” These statements and conclusions are all consistent with the decision of this court in Beyer v. Decker, 159 Md. 289 , 150 A. 804, 805 . In that case Decker, the employer, owned and operated farms in Cecil County on which he “carried on a dairying business.” He had a milk route on which ⁵⁸⁸ he delivered milk, and he shipped any surplus to a wholesaler. Beyer, the claimant, was regularly employed in dairy work, and drove the horse and wagon in which the surplus milk was carried to the railroad station for shipment to the wholesaler.

While. engaged in that work, he was struck by an engine and injured. The question in the case was whether that work was farm labor within the meaning of the Workmen’s Compensation Law, and it was decided', and properly decided, that it was. In the opinion in that case the court said: “It may be that there are dairying operations now carried on upon such a scale, or under such circumstances, that they could not properly be classified as agricultural, but if is true that dairying operations are still carried on by many farmers as parts of general agricultural occupations.” The appellant has seized upon that expression as support for the proposition that, where dairying is the principal business of the farm, the business is not to be regarded as an “agricultural service, pursuit or development,” but the language of the opinion completely negatives any such idea. What the court had in mind in making that statement was obviously the distinction between the production and sale of milk yielded by cattle maintained on the farm as a part of its operation, and the business of buying and selling milk, or of manufacturing and selling milk products apart from, and independent of, any farm, for obviously in the latter case, the work, not having any connection with a farm, would not be agricultural in its nature.

But where the milk sold is produced by cattle kept on the farm as a part of its operation, the business of producing and selling it is necessarily an agricultural pursuit, for the production of milk from cattle which consume the crops grown on the farm is as clearly an agricultural pursuit as raising sheep for their wool, or beef cattle for sale, or even of crops for sale. The fact that the farmer feeds his crops to cows, that they may yield milk which he can sell, does not make the business any less a farming business than if he had sold the crops directly. Nor is the nature of the business affected by the fact that to feed ⁵⁸⁹ his cows he may from time to time buy feed not grown on his own farm. And as the work in which the employee was engaged when he was injured was incidental to his general employment, which was that of a farm laborer, the provisions of the statute were not applicable to him.

We have been urged to give the act a broad and liberal interpretation in favor of the employee to reach a different result. But, while such a rule may properly be invoked to aid the apparent purpose of a statute, it may not be used to evade its plain intent or to deny its clear mandates. When the Legislature has declared the policy of the State, it is not for the court to nullify its declaration. It is quite true that" farming, which often involves the care of unruly and dangerous animals, the operation of complicated machinery, and the use of high explosives, may be a highly hazardous occupation, and it may be consistent with a sound economic policy to include it within the terms of the statute, but whether it is or not is a legislative, and not a judicial, question.

The Legislature has said in unmistakable language that the act shall not apply to it, and this court may not by devious construction override its will. The second question is not wholly free from difficulty. The Maryland Casualty Company issued to Frank B. Beasman a policy of insurance. No.