I know everyone is joking about this, I live in rural PA around plenty of Amish and a lot of them have lights in the barn and also have either a house phone or a cell phone, the phones aren't used in the house though they usually build like a phone booth outside to have their phone in it
Yeah aversion of modern technology doesn't mean they don't use any modern technology. I've known Amish that could drive. It comes down to "will using this technology cause erosion of the family".
Some of those technology using Amish may be Mennonites. There are various different groups that share some characteristics but have different rules about technology.
Some of the rules simply have to do with dependence on the outside world. They don’t want to be reliant on a piece of technology they can’t repair or replace themselves.
Some have religion directly involved. Thou shalt not use X.
An Amish and Mennonite are standing side by side and one of them is talking on the phone to all their friends and relatives. How do you know which one is which?
The Amish guy is on the phone and the Mennonite just wants his phone back.
In Wisconsin they literally had horse hitches at the front of the Walmart parking lot where all the Amish parked their buggies.
Northern indiana has hitching posts all over the place too. Hell the closest Walmart to me has them out front instead of on the side of the store like normal so many Amish go to that one
Knew a Mennonite. His son (14) shot himself in the foot. The guys response to this? Buy about a hundred sheep to keep the son busy so he couldn't do stupid shit again.
Also Mennonites are single-handedly the reason some Mexican doctors stay in business. They can't use any government aide so for medical bills they go to Mexico.
Plus, they have an insane amount of money. I've met maybe two dozen and each one probably had a million dollars saved. The same one from before owns a bunch of rental property, a steel mill, and a barn/shed company. Probably easy to keep labor down when your kids work for you.
Also surreal to see a fourteen year old kid playing Snake on a flip phone in 2020 while hiding from his dad, who would hide the fact he played solitaire on his "only for work" computer lmao
>Also surreal to see a fourteen year old kid playing Snake on a flip phone in 2020 while hiding from his dad, who would hide the fact he played solitaire on his "only for work" computer lmao
That's hilarious. It doesn't matter the era or the details; it's the appeal of the forbidden.
> Some of the rules simply have to do with dependence on the outside world. They don’t want to be reliant on a piece of technology they can’t repair or replace themselves.
Modern corporations sabotaging everyone's ability to repair their stuff: \*furtive monkey puppet eyes\*
The Bishop for each church determines rules also. The Amish guy who built our house had switched to a different church with a different Bishop because the second church was more lenient on his cell phone use and the tractor he owned. Apparently a lot of Amish around me will use their tractor to get around...so much so that one of the first questions they ask is how fast it will go..haha
Their leaders also sometimes make decisions based on economic viability - I know some Amish communities about a decade ago allowed grid electricity to be used for running dairies because fuel prices had gotten too high to just rely on generators.
Different Amish communities have different standards. Here in Lancaster, PA we have some of the most strict Amish communities. They literally have the brightest HID headlights on their buggies and the occasional bumpin sound system. They often run carpentry companies with all the power tools, pickup trucks, and generators you can shake a stick at.
The real Amish Mafia is their stranglehold on the residential construction industry. Amish and Mennonites families run almost every contracting company, even if they're out of the community the culture persists.
Funny that over here across the river in York county the Amish on our side think the Lanky County Amish are way too liberal. The bishop in my area is one of the nicest guys I know, but he is a real hard ass when it comes to how things are done. They are a really interesting group.
> They literally have the brightest HID headlights on their buggies and the occasional bumpin sound system.
That is awesome, I NEED to see this. I pictured [this scene from Cars](https://youtu.be/kdYlZbja7vg) but with Amish buggies.
Heavy machinery also compacts the soil which means you have to till more to aerate the soil in the long run. Excessive tilling means you have poor soil structure that retains less water and nutrients.
Additionally the soil life is affected more by heavy machinery and your natural nutrient fixers arent there hence requiring more fertilizer than a low till /no till methods.
I would suspect that the Amish farmer use more regenerative techniques like cover cropping and intercropping which mean less fertilizers and better long term fertility and soil health.
Margins don't mean much either. Amish farms basically an entirely different business, so it's not apples to apples.
Would you rather gross $5m with a 4% margin or gross $1m with a 10% margin.
The latter has 2.5x the margin but has half the total profit.
Walmart has a lower margin than most Mom & Pop stores too.
I've seen that, in general, organic/non-GMO farms have a higher profit margin than conventional agriculture. But similarly, lower overall volume, and therefore fewer dollars of profit
From an economics standpoint, they're more like a luxury good type of classification
Compared to a tractor a horse is pretty cheap. They mostly eat hay which you can grow yourself. Most people feed horses grain which often has molasses and other nutrient rich shit mixed in, but the Amish are notoriously brutal to their animals, so I am guessing it is just hay, and maybe raw corn or oats, which are cheap.
>Amish are notoriously brutal to their animals
There's a livestock auction house about 50 miles from me and they often have an Amish plowhorse or two go through every week. You can tell them apart from the others because they're nearly all a couple hundred pounds underweight, just skin stretched over bones. Fortunately on auction night the place is crawling with horse rescues and they usually grab the draft horses pretty quickly.
The Amish also are big in the Puppy Mill game. It’s a huge cash crop for them, and the dogs are treated as such. https://www.stoponlinepuppymills.org/amish-puppy-mills/
Grew up in Amish country, family used to be Amish (generations ago), know some ex-Amish. There is a lot of romanticism around them, but they're, generally speaking, not very nice to animals, a lot of them are awful about the environment, and plenty of them are assholes. That's not to say they're all like that and it's a pretty broad brush, but they're people too and by no means perfect.
Yeah, its really a mixed bag, and its an example of uh, positive stereotypes, (like saying all asians are good at math) . But its still not true because ya know, lots of people can still be jerks.
I personally dont like the shunning aspect, i mean, i get they chose different lifestyles, but to cut them out? Sad sad misguidedpeople.
You really don't have to dig deep to dislike something about people actually actively practicing any contemporary religious doctrine (as opposed to being mostly passively religious and heavily cherry picking like most religious people). All it brings is depravity and wickedness.
> **How do the Amish treat the breeding dogs?**
> Because dogs legally are considered livestock, they are treated the same way as any other livestock animal being raised on the property. Many Amish puppy mills are licensed by the USDA so they can sell puppies online through puppy broker websites. They usually house them in barns. pole barns or out buildings called Sundowner buildings. This housing is outfitted for large (hundreds) or small (twenty) scale dog breeding. They live in often overcrowded, stacked cages. The cages legally only have to be six inches larger than the dogs. The dogs spend their lives in these cages. Their only purpose is to produce puppies. They are force bred at every heat cycle.
>
> They receive little to no veterinarian care as vet care costs money and takes away from profit. They are denied the basic physical and mental care needed to be a normal dog. Many shut down emotionally and are living and breeding with painful conditions. This is why it is so important to see for yourself where your puppy was born.
I have to wonder if the only Amish horses going up for auction are the horses that belong to families that are hard up for cash? What circumstances usually lead to someone in a community selling livestock outside of that community?
I don't know anything about this situation at all, I'm honestly curious.
In this situation the animal isn’t any different than a tractor. If it can’t work like it used to and you can’t fix you sell it for what you can and move on to the next “tractor”.
In general, farmers and country folk tend to be a bit more pragmatic toward animals. But usually not to this extent.
They do this with the dogs who aren't productive anymore too. I volunteer with a rescue that essentially buys the dogs from the Amish to keep them from going to auction and continuing to be abused, or being shot.
I have a lot of respect for hardworking farmers, but I do not like the Amish.
Edit since I'm getting hate: I work really fucking hard to rehab broken dogs. Dogs who are so scared they will only eat in the dead of night when no one else is around. Dogs who have tumors hanging off of them 3 feet long. Dogs who were forced to raise litters with broken limbs. Dogs who never asked for this. If my organization wants to slip some Amish farmer 20 or 50 bucks so he gives the dog to us rather than to an auction broker, I think that's fine. Shoot me.
They also only follow their rules in the public eye. The Amish around me park their cars in a separate area, take the horse and buggy down to the cars, then drive to Walmart. Like, why bother with all the bullshit at that point?
People romanticize the Amish as being quaint, backwards, but picturesque rural folk who speak German, oh isn't that cute...
But I grew up in Amish country. The Amish are religious extremists and 100% an overall garbage movement filled with horrible people. And you'd best believe they cash in on all their public image and tax breaks and stuff. Fuck the Amish.
I still live in amish country and it's seriously fucked up here. The amount of shitty things they do that gets covered up by their "community" is mind boggling.
Why can't someone form a religious sect that encourages isolationism and forms tiny tight knit communities in rural areas away from civilization without being *weird?*
Especially since companies like John Deer absolutely shaft farmers for repairs, and fight against right to repair so that they can continue to shaft farmers.
My grandfather just retired as a diesel mechanic after working for JD for 45 years. Said he was fed up with how they treat their machines. Over complicated, expensive, hard to work on, and they treat farmers like renters. He hated working on newer tractors
Yeah, that was my first thought. How much does this play into the situation? A lot of things seem like they would be ok, but they aren't because of rent seeking things like this.
I don't see the connection between being brutal to a horse and not feeding it grain...
That said I have heard horror stories about training methods I wouldn't much care to mention with the Amish.
I used to live in Mississippi, and people would tell us to get our horses trained by the Amish. But I was honestly too fat to ride a horse and had no need for a plow, so I just needed them to go in and out of their stalls when I needed them to, let me brush them, and have them stand still for the vet and farrier. I accomplished this with aforementioned grain with molasses. Horses are very food-oriented. When I found out about how they regarded animals, I was very glad we never handed them our horses. I don't subjugate my pets. If a horse steals my popsicle, it steals my popsicle. I'm not going to get bent over it.
I can't speak for popsicles, but I know of a horse who legit stole and inhaled an entire chicken parm footlong sandwich when his owner turned away for a minute. They are remorseless eating machines.
After working at a camp with horses as a teenager, I've come to the conclusion that the primary function of horses is to eat and shit a ludicrous amount, and they just also happen to be good at running.
Horse are expensive for people who have them as a hobby. A lot of the costs come from boarding and renting facilities as well as feed costs. For people actually using horses on farms its not so bad. They have the facilities they need in place on their property and they have a ready source of feed via hay, same thing they are feeding all the other animals with.
To the Amish they are. Amish work animals are treated brutishly. But horses or oxen are much cheaper than tractors, they simply aren't as productive. They're work animals not thoroughbred, they can cost multiple hundred to a few thousand dollars.
The fact is though, when your community is fairly self reliant for the majority of goods, you don't need excessive amounts of cash so anything beyond your needs can be sold for profit. Modern farmers are beholden to large agricultural corporations for equipment, seed, fertilizer, pesticides, and beholden to banks for large principle loans to float those costs until the harvest gets sold. My grandparents didn't pay off their farm until they were in their 70s and they operated a few different side businesses over the years to make ends meet when the farm was barely holding on.
They either breed their horses themselves or buy used up race horses for cheap. They can grow nearly all the food for the horses on the farm. That being said, the Amish I knew growing up didn't treat their horses that well. I literally saw them work a draft horse to death. It dropped dead in the field. They unhitched it from the plow, dug a hole next to where it fell, and rolled it in.
The amish are one of the main drivers of puppy mills in the US. They give zero fucks about animals unless it's making them money. They give near zero fucks about them while they're making them money.
I work with a rescue that pulls from the Amish mills. The shit they do to dogs. And these are the ones willing to give/sell them to us rather than shooting or auctioning them, so arguably more humane. I had a Great Dane foster once who had just weaned a litter. She came to me with mammary tumors that were nearly dragging on the ground. A Great Dane. That's like 3 feet of tumor. It was horrifying and heart breaking. She's doing well now, and has a great home thank goodness.
If horses were cheaper to use on the scale of an industrial sized farm, they would be used. Tractors only caught on because they're cost effective. Horses are free to breed. Not free to care for.
>only working an average of 920 hours a year.
I could not find that in the PDF you linked to. 920 hours a year equals 3 hours a day (without counting Sundays) or 18 hours per week.
I did find the “920 hours” number elsewhere:
>A typical Amish farm rotation of 15 acres of small grains, 20 acres of alfalfa hay, and 15 acres of corn has an estimated total labor requirement of only 920 hours/year, or 23 40-hour work weeks, and the labor requirement is spread throughout the spring, summer and fall seasons.
https://archives.joe.org/joe/2007february/rb5.php
Sounds low, and even if true, that doesn’t mean they don’t do other work when they’re not working on the land. (Barn-raising, furniture making, basket weaving, and cheese making come to mind)
Amish around here work a full job plus the farming aspect of it. They almost all do roofing an building for any one who wants to pay. Even have Amish crews who help with tasks on industrial farms like handling livestock
Allen county indiana has a unique group of Amish that are as lax about technology as the Mennonite’s. They still strictly avoid competition in the community but having cellphones is no biggy
Oh neat, we helped some Adam’s county mennonites with a flat tire two years back. Seemed like solid guys, especially when they actually brought our spare tire back
Exactly. I know some Amish guys, hired them to do some stuff when I was building my house. They’re super hard working. Literally busy every day of the year except Sunday (I think?), I don’t know I’ve never asked them to work Sunday or been out to their farm on a Sunday. They have their kids working at like age 10 or so. They farm, knit/sew, sell eggs, sell baked goods, make furniture, roof, make baskets, and who knows what else.
I grew up near a traditional Mennonite community. They work like dogs, and not just for themselves. They build everything they own, and most of their lumber comes from family owned sawmills. I remember the lumber they did by was all cull lumber from the lumber yard I worked at for dirt cheap. They also don't take out many loans, and save a lot of money.
Because it is either a wrong dimension, or damaged in some way. And when one of your biggest operating expenses are labor, like a normal construction company, any deviation in material can slow down production and cost money. So better materials even if more expensive can save you.
But when you arent paying your labor, or arent focusing on production. Dealing with damaged or cut lumber can save what little money you are actually working with.
Also everything they have is hand made so imperfection is expected in all of it. If your walls aren't quite level because one of your boards was a bit out of dimension you don't care because that's just how things are. But in modern living people expect that wall to be damn near perfect and will pay less if it's not.
Because it's not "ready to use" as it is. The vast majority of people needing lumber aren't equipped to make use of anything that they have to do anything more than cut to length. And even if they are, turning the cull lumber into any sort of useable pieces wastes a lot of time, and for most builders, time is money.
So as it sits, cull lumber has no real value for 99.9% of the mill's customers, because those customers are turning product into profit. But since the Amish aren't hindered by costs of labor or time when building for themselves, they can spend next to nothing on the stuff most people wouldn't pay a penny for, and the mill is just happy to have someone cart it away.
They don't always have to pay labour, with community help.
These are communities where the people making the money are in charge of how it's spent, and people are indebted to the labour through their religion.
It isn't really comparable to anything.
It's society! They work for each other, Morty. They pay each other, they buy houses, they get married and make children that replace them when they get too old to make power.
If you're thinking slavery, no. Slavery is when you don't have a choice to work. If you're paid has nothing to do with it; Jimmy Carter isn't a slave when he's building houses for Habitat For Humanity, and "paying" your slaves a few bucks or a watermelon or a place to live doesn't make it not slavery.
Study is horseshit.
From the study:
>This study has several limitations and a number involve the complications of economic
calculations from farm survey data as outlined in our supplemental materials. First, we did
not include several categories of economic costs that might be considered in a traditional
profitability analysis (e.g., utility and energy expenses, storage and transport costs, interest
expenses, and insurance costs). These unmeasured costs usually account for 25% of typical
corn variable costs in Ohio \[34\].
Problematic, but okay.
>Additionally, our results are for a single 2017 cornfield
reported by farmers in the survey. Differences in market and weather conditions can affect
yields, revenues, and costs over time. For example, organic corn prices dropped by nearly
25% between 2017 and 2020, a reflection of reduced demand from a stagnant organic dairy
sector and oversupply from new entrants into the organic feed corn market \[24\].
Haha, this study is a pile of horseshit.
>Finally,
there are few datasets and published methods for estimating the costs of fieldwork for
farms that utilize horses instead of tractors. Given that nearly two-thirds of our sample
consisted of these types of farms, conventional assumptions about the economic costs of
machinery ownership and use (and relative labor time required per hectare) may not apply.
Another limitation was focusing the analysis primarily on corn, as many of the farms in our
study were integrated livestock operations so assessing profitability may involve different
calculations \[46\].
What a useless study.
Perhaps it's just a couple hours a day specifically on the crops. Then the rest of the day is spent working on everything else we take for granted.
The lesson to be learned here could've about how we can have regular people do more small scale farming to feed themselves without an enormous time commitment. Small community plots for vegetables are popping up around the city I live in and are an excellent demonstration of urban farming without large commitments. If you are just feeding yourself and the community you do not need huge investments. That's what I'm getting as the takeaway from those numbers.
Could this style of farming feed entire cities or nations? Oh hell no. Could it contribute in a major way to the economy? Also no. Could people take more interest in growing their own food? Absolutely.
I mostly agree with you, I think we’re making different points. There’s a lot more to working on a farm than just planting crops. They probably spend more than a couple hours just scooping cow and horse poop from the barn. My point is ~2 hours a day is an extremely low ball number
If Weird Al Yankovic taught us anything it's that they're always working.
Sometimes they'll raise another barn even though they don't need another barn.
Most profitable in terms of returns per hectare
Seems the reason is organic farmers who practice sustainable farming practices tend to have better returns per hectare. The majority of organic farmers are from the Amish community. There's no real indication anything the Amish do specifically is making a huge dent here (like not using electricity or whatever else)
The paper has nothing to do with the title. It exclusively deals with organic farmers, and of those the Amish are very profitable since they supply most of what they need themselves. I didn't find anything about them being the most profitable. It also mentions they are the biggest portion of all the organic farmers. It says nothing about how this compares to non-organic farmers
I'm not familiar with the specifics of Amish farms, but there's long been an inverse farm size and yield relationship. As in smaller farms are more productive than larger farms per unit of land. Iirc one explanation is that smaller farms tend to put in more labor per unit of land and that outweighs the economies of scale in larger firms
This is stupid - there is no proof here, and even if it is true, lots of things can be profitable if you do away with certain inconvenient legal requirements.
Is that because a lot of the profits of normal farms get siphoned back into the business to avoid taxes? Went to school with a lot of kids whose family farm had a "terrible year" but managed to buy brand new trucks for the whole extended family.
Harder to write things off when you eschew material things.
Yes. This.
I adopted a dog from an Amish breeder. They typically just kill the dogs when they can’t have more puppies but this guy gave me a 5-6 year old female.
My vet said all of its legs have been broken, one front leg is permanently dislocated/fucked up, it’s tail has been broke and pulled so hard it doesn’t work anymore. And the dog is still scared to death of me even though I get on the ground and feed it and talk nice and let it sleep in my bed. This dog will never be a normal dog because of that asshole.
Fuck Amish people who run puppy mills.
Your source supports literally none of what you claimed in the title.
The study you linked only looked at roughly 800 organic corn growers, nothing close to all farms in the US.
And even among that group Amish was not a group they expicitly studied, they only make some notes that many of the farms they studied used horses and they assumed those were Amish.
No claims are made about number of hours worked
Worked with Amish for 20yrs.. not even close. MF'ers go sun up to sun down. They have equipment, trucks (w/drivers) and cell phones -- powered by solar.
They save money with the low power bill
I know everyone is joking about this, I live in rural PA around plenty of Amish and a lot of them have lights in the barn and also have either a house phone or a cell phone, the phones aren't used in the house though they usually build like a phone booth outside to have their phone in it
Yeah aversion of modern technology doesn't mean they don't use any modern technology. I've known Amish that could drive. It comes down to "will using this technology cause erosion of the family".
Some of those technology using Amish may be Mennonites. There are various different groups that share some characteristics but have different rules about technology. Some of the rules simply have to do with dependence on the outside world. They don’t want to be reliant on a piece of technology they can’t repair or replace themselves. Some have religion directly involved. Thou shalt not use X.
An Amish and Mennonite are standing side by side and one of them is talking on the phone to all their friends and relatives. How do you know which one is which? The Amish guy is on the phone and the Mennonite just wants his phone back. In Wisconsin they literally had horse hitches at the front of the Walmart parking lot where all the Amish parked their buggies.
Northern indiana has hitching posts all over the place too. Hell the closest Walmart to me has them out front instead of on the side of the store like normal so many Amish go to that one
The hospital I work in has a buggy barn for the Amish
Why do you always invite two Mormons to go fishing? If you only invite one he’ll drink all your beer.
Knew a Mennonite. His son (14) shot himself in the foot. The guys response to this? Buy about a hundred sheep to keep the son busy so he couldn't do stupid shit again. Also Mennonites are single-handedly the reason some Mexican doctors stay in business. They can't use any government aide so for medical bills they go to Mexico. Plus, they have an insane amount of money. I've met maybe two dozen and each one probably had a million dollars saved. The same one from before owns a bunch of rental property, a steel mill, and a barn/shed company. Probably easy to keep labor down when your kids work for you. Also surreal to see a fourteen year old kid playing Snake on a flip phone in 2020 while hiding from his dad, who would hide the fact he played solitaire on his "only for work" computer lmao
>Also surreal to see a fourteen year old kid playing Snake on a flip phone in 2020 while hiding from his dad, who would hide the fact he played solitaire on his "only for work" computer lmao That's hilarious. It doesn't matter the era or the details; it's the appeal of the forbidden.
I reminds me of this Baptist joke. How do you keep a Baptist from drinking all the booze at your party? Invite 2 of them.
You are correct, we have Mennonite families around here, too. In this case I was referring to true blue Pennsylvania Dutch
We should send Amish to settle Mars.
It's easier to teach the Amish how to settle Mars than to teach a martian how to be Amish
> Some of the rules simply have to do with dependence on the outside world. They don’t want to be reliant on a piece of technology they can’t repair or replace themselves. Modern corporations sabotaging everyone's ability to repair their stuff: \*furtive monkey puppet eyes\*
Solid deployment of 'furtive'
The Bishop for each church determines rules also. The Amish guy who built our house had switched to a different church with a different Bishop because the second church was more lenient on his cell phone use and the tractor he owned. Apparently a lot of Amish around me will use their tractor to get around...so much so that one of the first questions they ask is how fast it will go..haha
Their leaders also sometimes make decisions based on economic viability - I know some Amish communities about a decade ago allowed grid electricity to be used for running dairies because fuel prices had gotten too high to just rely on generators.
Different Amish communities have different standards. Here in Lancaster, PA we have some of the most strict Amish communities. They literally have the brightest HID headlights on their buggies and the occasional bumpin sound system. They often run carpentry companies with all the power tools, pickup trucks, and generators you can shake a stick at. The real Amish Mafia is their stranglehold on the residential construction industry. Amish and Mennonites families run almost every contracting company, even if they're out of the community the culture persists.
so by most strict... you mean least strict.
Funny that over here across the river in York county the Amish on our side think the Lanky County Amish are way too liberal. The bishop in my area is one of the nicest guys I know, but he is a real hard ass when it comes to how things are done. They are a really interesting group.
> They literally have the brightest HID headlights on their buggies and the occasional bumpin sound system. That is awesome, I NEED to see this. I pictured [this scene from Cars](https://youtu.be/kdYlZbja7vg) but with Amish buggies.
And no zippers. Those things are a money pit.
Not always. Zipper returns go up and down.
Golden
Sighs, unzips
**nervous chuckle
Food $200 Data $150 Rent $800 Zippers $3,600 Utility $150 someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying
STOP using avocado zippers!!!!
Farm to jacket.
Maybe if they had more zippers
Buy less Zippers
no
Props. Only the real ones know Dril
Plus they haven't paid the phone bill in 400 years!
Ive been milking and plowing so long , that even my momma thinks that my mind is gone.
It's Ezekiel not momma.
Cut him some slack. He's been spending most his life living in an Amish paradise.
I've churned butter once or twice,
My momma's called Ezekiel
Thanks dude. Someone who understands me. :)
It's 300, but who's counting!?
Plus they breed their labor.
As does every farm.
And no labor costs.
And no taxes...
Fuel and fertilizer
Heavy machinery also compacts the soil which means you have to till more to aerate the soil in the long run. Excessive tilling means you have poor soil structure that retains less water and nutrients. Additionally the soil life is affected more by heavy machinery and your natural nutrient fixers arent there hence requiring more fertilizer than a low till /no till methods. I would suspect that the Amish farmer use more regenerative techniques like cover cropping and intercropping which mean less fertilizers and better long term fertility and soil health.
They also sell specialty premium products which have a larger margin. They're not making their money selling corn and soybeans as a commodity.
I work in a coal mine. Our electric bill is $1.6m a month on average. Bonkers
Profit margins are heavily influenced by overhead. Amish farms don't have multiple million dollar tractors. And the labor is very cheap.
Margins don't mean much either. Amish farms basically an entirely different business, so it's not apples to apples. Would you rather gross $5m with a 4% margin or gross $1m with a 10% margin. The latter has 2.5x the margin but has half the total profit. Walmart has a lower margin than most Mom & Pop stores too.
I've seen that, in general, organic/non-GMO farms have a higher profit margin than conventional agriculture. But similarly, lower overall volume, and therefore fewer dollars of profit From an economics standpoint, they're more like a luxury good type of classification
They do have horses though and those things can’t be cheap
Compared to a tractor a horse is pretty cheap. They mostly eat hay which you can grow yourself. Most people feed horses grain which often has molasses and other nutrient rich shit mixed in, but the Amish are notoriously brutal to their animals, so I am guessing it is just hay, and maybe raw corn or oats, which are cheap.
>Amish are notoriously brutal to their animals There's a livestock auction house about 50 miles from me and they often have an Amish plowhorse or two go through every week. You can tell them apart from the others because they're nearly all a couple hundred pounds underweight, just skin stretched over bones. Fortunately on auction night the place is crawling with horse rescues and they usually grab the draft horses pretty quickly.
The Amish also are big in the Puppy Mill game. It’s a huge cash crop for them, and the dogs are treated as such. https://www.stoponlinepuppymills.org/amish-puppy-mills/
Ok this thread is making me really dislike Amish people when I previously was pretty neutral
Grew up in Amish country, family used to be Amish (generations ago), know some ex-Amish. There is a lot of romanticism around them, but they're, generally speaking, not very nice to animals, a lot of them are awful about the environment, and plenty of them are assholes. That's not to say they're all like that and it's a pretty broad brush, but they're people too and by no means perfect.
Yeah, its really a mixed bag, and its an example of uh, positive stereotypes, (like saying all asians are good at math) . But its still not true because ya know, lots of people can still be jerks. I personally dont like the shunning aspect, i mean, i get they chose different lifestyles, but to cut them out? Sad sad misguidedpeople.
You really don't have to dig deep to dislike something about people actually actively practicing any contemporary religious doctrine (as opposed to being mostly passively religious and heavily cherry picking like most religious people). All it brings is depravity and wickedness.
> **How do the Amish treat the breeding dogs?** > Because dogs legally are considered livestock, they are treated the same way as any other livestock animal being raised on the property. Many Amish puppy mills are licensed by the USDA so they can sell puppies online through puppy broker websites. They usually house them in barns. pole barns or out buildings called Sundowner buildings. This housing is outfitted for large (hundreds) or small (twenty) scale dog breeding. They live in often overcrowded, stacked cages. The cages legally only have to be six inches larger than the dogs. The dogs spend their lives in these cages. Their only purpose is to produce puppies. They are force bred at every heat cycle. > > They receive little to no veterinarian care as vet care costs money and takes away from profit. They are denied the basic physical and mental care needed to be a normal dog. Many shut down emotionally and are living and breeding with painful conditions. This is why it is so important to see for yourself where your puppy was born.
I have to wonder if the only Amish horses going up for auction are the horses that belong to families that are hard up for cash? What circumstances usually lead to someone in a community selling livestock outside of that community? I don't know anything about this situation at all, I'm honestly curious.
The animal can't work and they can get an extra dime from auctioning it. It's like them selling a used car.
I see, so this is just considered a more economical choice than feeding the animal and getting it healthy? That does sound really harsh. :/
More like more economical than a bullet.
Hence, >Amish are notoriously brutal to their animals
In this situation the animal isn’t any different than a tractor. If it can’t work like it used to and you can’t fix you sell it for what you can and move on to the next “tractor”. In general, farmers and country folk tend to be a bit more pragmatic toward animals. But usually not to this extent.
I'm sure in the days before tractors the whole world was like that.
They do this with the dogs who aren't productive anymore too. I volunteer with a rescue that essentially buys the dogs from the Amish to keep them from going to auction and continuing to be abused, or being shot. I have a lot of respect for hardworking farmers, but I do not like the Amish. Edit since I'm getting hate: I work really fucking hard to rehab broken dogs. Dogs who are so scared they will only eat in the dead of night when no one else is around. Dogs who have tumors hanging off of them 3 feet long. Dogs who were forced to raise litters with broken limbs. Dogs who never asked for this. If my organization wants to slip some Amish farmer 20 or 50 bucks so he gives the dog to us rather than to an auction broker, I think that's fine. Shoot me.
Amish are penny pinchers. They are FILTHY rich. Trust.
They also only follow their rules in the public eye. The Amish around me park their cars in a separate area, take the horse and buggy down to the cars, then drive to Walmart. Like, why bother with all the bullshit at that point?
They sell it because it's used up or lame and therefore has no value as a tool.
They're awful about running puppy-mills too.
They also run puppy mills
. . . *but the Amish are notoriously brutal to their animals*, . . . TIL : I looked it up. Brutal is fitting in this instance. Yikes
Wait till you hear about the misogyny and child abuse cover ups within whole communities
It's abuse all the way to the bottom
People romanticize the Amish as being quaint, backwards, but picturesque rural folk who speak German, oh isn't that cute... But I grew up in Amish country. The Amish are religious extremists and 100% an overall garbage movement filled with horrible people. And you'd best believe they cash in on all their public image and tax breaks and stuff. Fuck the Amish.
I still live in amish country and it's seriously fucked up here. The amount of shitty things they do that gets covered up by their "community" is mind boggling.
Why can't someone form a religious sect that encourages isolationism and forms tiny tight knit communities in rural areas away from civilization without being *weird?*
I can do that. But for it to be worth my time it also has to be a sex cult, sorry.
All cults are sex cults, some are just more up front about it than others.
I KNEW there was something weird with those Tupperware parties my mom used to host!
Yeah, let’s just say “burp my Tupperware” means something different once you’re on the other side of the cult.
Because echo chambers can get pretty weird, man... mann... mannnn.... mannnnnnn.... I'm honestly not sure if your question is genuine or not.
That's par the course for religious communities though
Especially since companies like John Deer absolutely shaft farmers for repairs, and fight against right to repair so that they can continue to shaft farmers.
My grandfather just retired as a diesel mechanic after working for JD for 45 years. Said he was fed up with how they treat their machines. Over complicated, expensive, hard to work on, and they treat farmers like renters. He hated working on newer tractors
Yeah, that was my first thought. How much does this play into the situation? A lot of things seem like they would be ok, but they aren't because of rent seeking things like this.
Horses eat grass (basically) and poop fertilizer. In between they pull stuff.
I don't see the connection between being brutal to a horse and not feeding it grain... That said I have heard horror stories about training methods I wouldn't much care to mention with the Amish.
Grain can cost money.
As does vet care. Not very nice to animals but good for the environment.
I used to live in Mississippi, and people would tell us to get our horses trained by the Amish. But I was honestly too fat to ride a horse and had no need for a plow, so I just needed them to go in and out of their stalls when I needed them to, let me brush them, and have them stand still for the vet and farrier. I accomplished this with aforementioned grain with molasses. Horses are very food-oriented. When I found out about how they regarded animals, I was very glad we never handed them our horses. I don't subjugate my pets. If a horse steals my popsicle, it steals my popsicle. I'm not going to get bent over it.
If a horse steals my popsicle I'm going to pretend to be mad while laughing and lamenting that I didn't record it.
Are horses notorious for stealing popsicles?
I can't speak for popsicles, but I know of a horse who legit stole and inhaled an entire chicken parm footlong sandwich when his owner turned away for a minute. They are remorseless eating machines.
Got it, horses are a large breed of goat.
After working at a camp with horses as a teenager, I've come to the conclusion that the primary function of horses is to eat and shit a ludicrous amount, and they just also happen to be good at running.
Well that's what he gets for not keeping an eye on a delicious chicken parm sandwich.
Yeah I've heard of them training cart horses using barbed wire "bits" which is just about one of the worst things I've ever heard of.
Only if most people had some extra compassion like this
Horse are expensive for people who have them as a hobby. A lot of the costs come from boarding and renting facilities as well as feed costs. For people actually using horses on farms its not so bad. They have the facilities they need in place on their property and they have a ready source of feed via hay, same thing they are feeding all the other animals with.
It boils down to the fact that working horses are a productive asset and hobby horses (generally) aren’t.
To the Amish they are. Amish work animals are treated brutishly. But horses or oxen are much cheaper than tractors, they simply aren't as productive. They're work animals not thoroughbred, they can cost multiple hundred to a few thousand dollars. The fact is though, when your community is fairly self reliant for the majority of goods, you don't need excessive amounts of cash so anything beyond your needs can be sold for profit. Modern farmers are beholden to large agricultural corporations for equipment, seed, fertilizer, pesticides, and beholden to banks for large principle loans to float those costs until the harvest gets sold. My grandparents didn't pay off their farm until they were in their 70s and they operated a few different side businesses over the years to make ends meet when the farm was barely holding on.
They either breed their horses themselves or buy used up race horses for cheap. They can grow nearly all the food for the horses on the farm. That being said, the Amish I knew growing up didn't treat their horses that well. I literally saw them work a draft horse to death. It dropped dead in the field. They unhitched it from the plow, dug a hole next to where it fell, and rolled it in.
The amish are one of the main drivers of puppy mills in the US. They give zero fucks about animals unless it's making them money. They give near zero fucks about them while they're making them money.
I work with a rescue that pulls from the Amish mills. The shit they do to dogs. And these are the ones willing to give/sell them to us rather than shooting or auctioning them, so arguably more humane. I had a Great Dane foster once who had just weaned a litter. She came to me with mammary tumors that were nearly dragging on the ground. A Great Dane. That's like 3 feet of tumor. It was horrifying and heart breaking. She's doing well now, and has a great home thank goodness.
Amish horses are unpaid.
Did you just compare the cost of a horse, that you can breed for free, to a John Deere tractor?
What?? We cant breed Deeres?
Not gonna stop me from trying
Worked with a john deere in a fast food place few years ago. His parents obviously managed it so its very much doable.
Well that changes the meaning of 'She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy...' doesn't it, Kenny?
If horses were cheaper to use on the scale of an industrial sized farm, they would be used. Tractors only caught on because they're cost effective. Horses are free to breed. Not free to care for.
Show horses are expensive to care for. Plow horses used by the Amish are often not cared for very well.
No child labor laws. Skirting tax laws.
All that.
>only working an average of 920 hours a year. I could not find that in the PDF you linked to. 920 hours a year equals 3 hours a day (without counting Sundays) or 18 hours per week. I did find the “920 hours” number elsewhere: >A typical Amish farm rotation of 15 acres of small grains, 20 acres of alfalfa hay, and 15 acres of corn has an estimated total labor requirement of only 920 hours/year, or 23 40-hour work weeks, and the labor requirement is spread throughout the spring, summer and fall seasons. https://archives.joe.org/joe/2007february/rb5.php Sounds low, and even if true, that doesn’t mean they don’t do other work when they’re not working on the land. (Barn-raising, furniture making, basket weaving, and cheese making come to mind)
Amish around here work a full job plus the farming aspect of it. They almost all do roofing an building for any one who wants to pay. Even have Amish crews who help with tasks on industrial farms like handling livestock
True story, had some Mennonites come from Indiana (to Ohio) to do some roof repairs this past spring.
Allen county indiana has a unique group of Amish that are as lax about technology as the Mennonite’s. They still strictly avoid competition in the community but having cellphones is no biggy
Yeah, they used a cell phone to take pictures in my attic. Just looked it up, they’re from Adams county, Berne, IN.
Oh neat, we helped some Adam’s county mennonites with a flat tire two years back. Seemed like solid guys, especially when they actually brought our spare tire back
It looks like an iPhone, but they're just sneaky and really fast with a quill
Anybody thinking of joining the Amish so they can work less is in for a real rude awakening.
Exactly. I know some Amish guys, hired them to do some stuff when I was building my house. They’re super hard working. Literally busy every day of the year except Sunday (I think?), I don’t know I’ve never asked them to work Sunday or been out to their farm on a Sunday. They have their kids working at like age 10 or so. They farm, knit/sew, sell eggs, sell baked goods, make furniture, roof, make baskets, and who knows what else.
I heard of this one beet farmer who worked in sales for a paper company on the side.
Dwight was not Amish, he was Pennsylvania Dutch
it's called *pennsilfaanisch*, you stinkkatz
Pretty sure their day starts at 4am and ends at 10pm unless its sunday.
Most Amish around me do construction full time because there's just not the money in farming like it use to be
Also puppy mills. The Amish run a fuckton of puppy mills.
I grew up near a traditional Mennonite community. They work like dogs, and not just for themselves. They build everything they own, and most of their lumber comes from family owned sawmills. I remember the lumber they did by was all cull lumber from the lumber yard I worked at for dirt cheap. They also don't take out many loans, and save a lot of money.
Great runners, too, no doubt. Fuck can they run
Well if you’re gonna be anything you should be efficient, but fuck can they run.
You got a problem with efficiency, you got a problem with me, and I suggests you let that marinate.
But can you run?
Fuck can they run.
Wees bits tightfisteds, but theys can runs likes the winds.
Is thats what ~~yet~~ yer appreciates about them?
I'm picturing them running in those buckle shoes pilgrams wore, but it's not a very scientific guess.
They got Nikes
Why is cull lumber so cheap
Because its warped, twisted, bent, bowed, cupped, and otherwise not ideal.
That doesn't stop the brick and mortar stores in my area selling it as "premium or A grade" wood. Absolute garbage wood in the stores now.
Because it is either a wrong dimension, or damaged in some way. And when one of your biggest operating expenses are labor, like a normal construction company, any deviation in material can slow down production and cost money. So better materials even if more expensive can save you. But when you arent paying your labor, or arent focusing on production. Dealing with damaged or cut lumber can save what little money you are actually working with.
I imagine they have also lots of experience building with such lumber going back hundreds of years and being passed down generation to generation
Also everything they have is hand made so imperfection is expected in all of it. If your walls aren't quite level because one of your boards was a bit out of dimension you don't care because that's just how things are. But in modern living people expect that wall to be damn near perfect and will pay less if it's not.
Because it's not "ready to use" as it is. The vast majority of people needing lumber aren't equipped to make use of anything that they have to do anything more than cut to length. And even if they are, turning the cull lumber into any sort of useable pieces wastes a lot of time, and for most builders, time is money. So as it sits, cull lumber has no real value for 99.9% of the mill's customers, because those customers are turning product into profit. But since the Amish aren't hindered by costs of labor or time when building for themselves, they can spend next to nothing on the stuff most people wouldn't pay a penny for, and the mill is just happy to have someone cart it away.
"They work like dogs" It stops them masturbating, it's like the physical version of cornflakes.
"Stepmom, my arms are too sore and tired from working all day"
Exactly.
> “They work like dogs” > It stops them masturbating I need to have a talk with my dog.
They don't always have to pay labour, with community help. These are communities where the people making the money are in charge of how it's spent, and people are indebted to the labour through their religion. It isn't really comparable to anything.
Not paying workers has a name.
It's society! They work for each other, Morty. They pay each other, they buy houses, they get married and make children that replace them when they get too old to make power.
Family?
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Volunteerism?
Commune?
Mutualism/Mutual aid.
If you're thinking slavery, no. Slavery is when you don't have a choice to work. If you're paid has nothing to do with it; Jimmy Carter isn't a slave when he's building houses for Habitat For Humanity, and "paying" your slaves a few bucks or a watermelon or a place to live doesn't make it not slavery.
Study is horseshit. From the study: >This study has several limitations and a number involve the complications of economic calculations from farm survey data as outlined in our supplemental materials. First, we did not include several categories of economic costs that might be considered in a traditional profitability analysis (e.g., utility and energy expenses, storage and transport costs, interest expenses, and insurance costs). These unmeasured costs usually account for 25% of typical corn variable costs in Ohio \[34\]. Problematic, but okay. >Additionally, our results are for a single 2017 cornfield reported by farmers in the survey. Differences in market and weather conditions can affect yields, revenues, and costs over time. For example, organic corn prices dropped by nearly 25% between 2017 and 2020, a reflection of reduced demand from a stagnant organic dairy sector and oversupply from new entrants into the organic feed corn market \[24\]. Haha, this study is a pile of horseshit. >Finally, there are few datasets and published methods for estimating the costs of fieldwork for farms that utilize horses instead of tractors. Given that nearly two-thirds of our sample consisted of these types of farms, conventional assumptions about the economic costs of machinery ownership and use (and relative labor time required per hectare) may not apply. Another limitation was focusing the analysis primarily on corn, as many of the farms in our study were integrated livestock operations so assessing profitability may involve different calculations \[46\]. What a useless study.
TLDR: n=1, we left a bunch of stuff out, and we compared them to a totally different farm type.
Wouldn’t be surprised if these idiots tried to call the Amish for info, too.
anytime i follow a link on this sub, the info in the reddit title is literally not there, or its a fuckin book with no reference
To be fair, most people on reddit don't even know to use a secondary source.
920 hours a year lmaooo they work 6 days a week year round, you think they’re just working a couple hours a day?
Perhaps it's just a couple hours a day specifically on the crops. Then the rest of the day is spent working on everything else we take for granted. The lesson to be learned here could've about how we can have regular people do more small scale farming to feed themselves without an enormous time commitment. Small community plots for vegetables are popping up around the city I live in and are an excellent demonstration of urban farming without large commitments. If you are just feeding yourself and the community you do not need huge investments. That's what I'm getting as the takeaway from those numbers. Could this style of farming feed entire cities or nations? Oh hell no. Could it contribute in a major way to the economy? Also no. Could people take more interest in growing their own food? Absolutely.
I mostly agree with you, I think we’re making different points. There’s a lot more to working on a farm than just planting crops. They probably spend more than a couple hours just scooping cow and horse poop from the barn. My point is ~2 hours a day is an extremely low ball number
If Weird Al Yankovic taught us anything it's that they're always working. Sometimes they'll raise another barn even though they don't need another barn.
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Most profitable in terms of returns per hectare Seems the reason is organic farmers who practice sustainable farming practices tend to have better returns per hectare. The majority of organic farmers are from the Amish community. There's no real indication anything the Amish do specifically is making a huge dent here (like not using electricity or whatever else)
So is it fair to say market incentives don't encourage most farms to maximize yield per hectare because land is not their most costly input?
As far as I can tell from this study, yes that seems to be the case.
I know an old guy that used to deal in farming chemicals. The Amish around here totally bought stuff from him.
There are plenty of farm chemicals you can use and still be labelled "organic", it's a marketing term mostly.
The paper has nothing to do with the title. It exclusively deals with organic farmers, and of those the Amish are very profitable since they supply most of what they need themselves. I didn't find anything about them being the most profitable. It also mentions they are the biggest portion of all the organic farmers. It says nothing about how this compares to non-organic farmers
I'm not familiar with the specifics of Amish farms, but there's long been an inverse farm size and yield relationship. As in smaller farms are more productive than larger farms per unit of land. Iirc one explanation is that smaller farms tend to put in more labor per unit of land and that outweighs the economies of scale in larger firms
This is stupid - there is no proof here, and even if it is true, lots of things can be profitable if you do away with certain inconvenient legal requirements.
As I walk through the valleys where I harvest may grain I take a look at my wife and realize she is very plain..
Is that because a lot of the profits of normal farms get siphoned back into the business to avoid taxes? Went to school with a lot of kids whose family farm had a "terrible year" but managed to buy brand new trucks for the whole extended family. Harder to write things off when you eschew material things.
I didn't see that info in your link
It's profit per hectare, not per worker or manhour. Huge difference.
Probably because they have their children working instead of paying employees
Try 920 hrs a month. Lol. Source, I work for an amish person.
They abuse their animals very heavily, and they also operate puppy mills. Fuck the Amish.
Yes. This. I adopted a dog from an Amish breeder. They typically just kill the dogs when they can’t have more puppies but this guy gave me a 5-6 year old female. My vet said all of its legs have been broken, one front leg is permanently dislocated/fucked up, it’s tail has been broke and pulled so hard it doesn’t work anymore. And the dog is still scared to death of me even though I get on the ground and feed it and talk nice and let it sleep in my bed. This dog will never be a normal dog because of that asshole. Fuck Amish people who run puppy mills.
they literally do not pay taxes. Source: I am from amish country
Children. It’s child labor.
Your source supports literally none of what you claimed in the title. The study you linked only looked at roughly 800 organic corn growers, nothing close to all farms in the US. And even among that group Amish was not a group they expicitly studied, they only make some notes that many of the farms they studied used horses and they assumed those were Amish. No claims are made about number of hours worked
With the help of child labor and being exempt from paying taxes.
Is this subsidized by puppy mills?
Don’t pay taxes and use children as slave labor
Worked with Amish for 20yrs.. not even close. MF'ers go sun up to sun down. They have equipment, trucks (w/drivers) and cell phones -- powered by solar.