Farmers getting older

Kathleen Smith is CEO of a company called Life Essentials. One of the things they do is make lifts or elevators that aid farmers who have trouble getting up and into the cabs of their farm equipment. Getting older is one of those conditions and I asked her why the age of farmers in our country is increasing. Well, one thing is the succession of the young family members not wanting to continue into farming, and the farmer cannot quit because that's his only income, so he has to keep farming and you can't live off of Social Security. So you just basically have to keep farming until your older years. I know when I first started getting into this, the average age of a farmer was forty seven years old. Then it went to 57 years old, and now it is over 60 years old for the average age of a farmer. But a lot of them just, you know, that's all they know. That's all they love. They just keep doing it until, I mean, I had one guy ninety five years old. He called us up and bought a new combine and wanted to get into it, and he couldn't climb the ladder. And so we went for the lift on it, and it happened to be his 90th birthday and he got on that ladder and he gets in that combine and you don't see him for hours because he's out running the thing in the field. So it's a lot of the farmers are just that's what they know, and that's what they love to do. Speaker2: Most of them born into that life, it's their way of life and they just can't stop. God bless them.