Still Earning Their Keep........

In my job with a fertilizer company, I often spend time waiting along the road for the spreader or sprayer operator to arrive to load the product I have brought out.  A week or so ago, I spent a couple of hours waiting just up the road from the customer's farmstead.  An older gentleman, he is in the "slowdown" years of his farming career, and new equipment is not in the plan.  .  His son  (I suppose) was there helping, and over the time I was there, I got to watching the equipment coming and going, and got to thinking. 

There is a lot of 40, 50, and even 60 plus year old machinery out there still earning it's keep on the farm.  In the time I was watching, there was an 1850 Oliver heading for the field with an IHC 470 disk,a bit later an early '70's vintage Deutz headed out with what appeared to be the same disk, and later a two cylinder Deere, probably a 70 backed out into the field, hitched up to a single roller and disappeared back among the trees and buildings.

It made me wonder if the John Deere tractors rolling off the assembly line today will still be working for a living when they are as old as the 70 I saw the other day!.