Another perspective Scott Hillman 07/09/2012 @ 9:13am I have another point on this - I'm a fairly young farmer (mid 30's) and I run my farm as a side venture, maintaining a full-time office job as my primary source of income. Since the farm is small, it's not viable as my primary source of income, but it makes a great supplemental income and psychologically is a great break from life in an office. I also am slowly upgrading the older equipment that I inherited and am having a hard time finding good used equipment in the size that fits my operation (small). Since I have a full-time job, I can place a firm dollar value on my time, so I need the equipment I use, even though it's small and older, to be reliable and not have a lot of downtime.

Pete & Roy GREG PETERSON 07/06/2012 @ 9:02pm Roy, great piece, always enjoy your stuff :-) Thanks for your take, very insightful points. Perhaps we should intertwine our used machinery market & grain markets commentaries more often :-) Hope I didn't give the impression in my earlier piece that I was questioning the wisdom of older farmers still being big buyers on the used market. Beyond the raw sale price data & used value trends I always enjoy looking at the psychology of whose buying what, who isn't buying, why, why not, etc. Your points resonate with what many older farmers have been telling me last couple years. Keep up the GREAT work...hope to catch you at an auction soon too! Pete Machinery Pete

Great column! DANIEL LOOKER 07/06/2012 @ 3:59pm We all know that many farmers choose not to retire at what is considered a typical retirement age. Besides providing better income than other possible investments, there may be another benefit from continuing to plant and harvest--better health. Some (not all) studies suggest benefits from continuing to work. Here's one posting about the subject: http://longevity.about.com/od/healthyagingandlongevity/a/retirement.htm