In the summer of 1996 Elizabeth and I went on a study tour of Amish country in Ohio’s Holmes County.
Before the tour, all we knew about the Amish was that they wore plain clothes, travelled in horse-drawn buggies and farmed with horse-drawn equipment.
We assumed there was a religious reason why they did not use tractors and electricity. We also assumed they were subsistence farmers because after all, how could you make real money farming with horses? We were in for surprises.
The first was that many Amish do have tractors; they just don’t farm land with them. The reason is simple: they don’t own cars, use electricity or farm land with tractors because they believe those technologies ruin communities.
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New technology is judged in part on what effect it will have on their families, churches and communities. As one Amish farmer pointed out, if they used tractors in the field, one man could farm 1,000 acres. With horses it takes 10 men, which means 10 family farms instead of one.
Tractors and other gasoline engines are used to power equipment such as grain separators and grinders. Balers and corn harvesters have small engines, but are pulled by horses.
Another surprise was that on a per acre basis, the Amish farms we visited were among the most profitable we have ever seen. There seems to be two reasons for this: they do not have huge debt caused by “heavy metal hypnosis” and they rarely sell grain directly off the farm. Instead, they add value to it by running it through an animal.
There are two houses on most Amish farms: the main house and the “dodie” or grandparents house. The generation that owns the land normally lives in the big house and the older generation lives in the dodie house. When the children grow up, one of them usually wants to buy the home farm. Commonly the couple buying the farm lives in the dodie house until they have a family.
Then they move into the big house and the parents move into the dodie house. This transition usually occurs when the parents are in their mid-50s. The parents are then free to do community work and the young people are able to take over the farm when they are still young enough to have the energy they need to make it a success.
The young couple buying the farm pay market value less a 10 to 15 percent discount because they are expected to provide the parents
with eggs, milk and meat until they die and to care for them in their old age. The parents usually help with chores.
Farmland in that part of Ohio was selling for $2,000 to $4,000 per acre when we were there. The couple buying the farm normally first buys the chattels, such as animals and equipment, and then the farm.
One farm we visited was run by a couple in their 30s who had begun to buy it about five years earlier. It was a 66 acre farm and cost them $110,000 for the land and an undisclosed amount for the chattels. It took them two years to pay for the chattels and another three to pay for the farm, all while taking profit from the farm.
This farm was typical of the Amish farms we visited, although the average farm is about 100 acres. Amish farmers use a five-year rotation of forages, small grains, soybeans and corn, have a small dairy herd of usually 12 cows and sell milk to a local cheese factory. They typically own five draft horses, three beef cows, a bull, a couple of calves and a steer for meat, 16 feeder pigs plus a barrow for meat and
five sheep.
They also have a day-old dairy calf enterprise. A trucker brings the calves up on a back-haul from large dairy herds in Florida and the family feeds them up to about 450 pounds before selling them. They feed 30 to 40 head at a time.
Most Amish farms run several small enterprises. We saw harness makers, horse-shoeing stall manufacturers, rope-makers, vegetable growers, sausage makers, machinery manufacturers and buggy makers.
Driving around in that area reminded me of the Prairies 50 or more years ago: farms every kilometre, thriving towns 10 to 15 km apart and the land in great condition.
Would I want to be Amish? No. They seem to have rigid religious beliefs and a school system that ends at Grade 8, which I would not care for. But they certainly do know how to sustain a local economy and make a good living on small farms.
Edmonton-based Noel McNaughton is a sponsored speaker with the Canadian Farm Business Management Council. He can be reached at 780-432-5492, e-mail:farm@midlife-men.com or visit www.midlife-men.com.
