ST. ISIDORE — Daniel Coulange has a bed in a small room in the barn where he sometimes sleeps between chores. His 400 Holsteins get the big room next door.

He wakes at 2:15 each morning—he figures he sleeps about four hours a night. The bed in the barn is for those days he needs some extra down time. After three cups of coffee, he starts the milking at 2:30 a.m. Without the caffeine, he admits, he’s like a smoker without a cigarette. The second milking is at 2:30 p.m. This is the routine, seven days a week, since he arrived from France in 1981. His son returned to France where he is milking 80 cows. Catholics will tell you Coulange chose a good location to farm, east of Ottawa, near the town named after the patron saint of farmers, St. Isidore, who himself was a farmer in Spain 1,000 years ago.

Coulange is a small, slim, sturdy man but he’s no young buck. He’s 66-years-old, which is the median age of retiring farmers in Canada. As many farmers retire after age 66 as before. He turns 67 this month and considers, when he thinks of it, that 70 is a good age to lighten the load and take up other work. "I have passion and I have the health to continue," he said. "You are surprised?"

He has one hired hand to help with milking in a double-12 parallel milking parlour. He’s fortunate that his knees and back are still strong. While the average age of a dairy operator in Ontario is 47, many operators suffer from pains that prevent them from carrying on.

As for retirement, "that’s not a word in my vocabulary. I get pleasure from working," he said, unless, of course, the job is picking rocks. His favourite project is genetics, watching and planning for the possibility of a prize cow. His wife looks after the calves.

"He’s just go, go, go, go," said eastern Ontario real estate agent Marcel Smellink. "It’s seven days a week. It’s unbelievable. Some guys just don’t know anything else but to wake up and start."

"You leave with a guilty feeling," said retired dairy farmer Dennis St. Pierre, after a visit to the Coulange farm. "But does the man really have to work this hard? It shows how much the Europeans love to farm."

While Coulange is a testimony to hard, physical work, he is not alone. Farmers tend to retire later than most people and as some would say they never really retire. And that’s a good sign as studies have shown that retirement is actually bad for your health. People who stay physically and socially active escape the retirement curse of depression and mobility constraints, concluded the National Bureau of Economic Research last year after an exhaustive study. Having no plans for the day seems to be the biggest problem. But stop in on any farm, look around the yard, and you’ll see at least five projects on the go.

Near Ingleside, west of Cornwall, 72-year-old Allan Wells is still milking 30 cows. He started milking when he was 10 and took over the farm at age 12.

Said neighbour Perry Hart: "He’s a super, super, super nice guy, sharp as a whip.

It’s about time he retired. But he told the milk (truck driver) if he sold the cows, ‘what am I going to do?’"

What indeed? The United States National Institute on Aging sent researchers to three locations in the world (specific regions of Italy, Japan and California) where it was discovered that people lived longer than just about everyone else. Here’s what these strong, elderly people had in common in all three regions: they didn’t smoke, they put family first, kept socially engaged, ate fruits, vegetables and whole grains and were active everyday.