Amish Dedication to Farming and Adoption of Organic Dairy Systems - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 227

Chapter 12
Amish Dedication to Farming and Adoption
of Organic Dairy Systems

Caroline Brock and Bradford Barham

12.1 Background on Amish Dairy Farm Adoption Decisions

Amish dairy producers have a solid and growing presence on the farm landscape,
and account for over 1/8 of all U.S. dairy farms (Cross 2007 ). In recent decades,
many Amish who have a desire to farm as a way to maintain religious and
family values have emigrated from eastern urbanizing rural areas to states, such
as Wisconsin, Michigan and Missouri, where non-Amish smaller-scale family
farmers are leaving farming (Hostetler 1993 ;Cross 2004 , 2007 ). Amish farmers
are estimated to account for about 10 % of the more than 12,000 dairy farms in
Wisconsin, 'America's Dairyland' (Cross 2007 ), and they frequently use barns that
would otherwise be abandoned or torn down (Cross 2004 ). In fact, Wisconsin now
has the second largest concentration of Amish church settlements in the U.S. (Luthy
2003 ). There are similar dense pockets of Amish dairy farms in other states that
historically have had large numbers of small dairy herds (e.g. Iowa, Indiana, Ohio,
Pennsylvania, Missouri and Kentucky) (Cross 2007 ).
Organic dairy farming has spread rapidly in Wisconsin, especially in the South-
western region of the state, near to the headquarters of the nation's leading organic
dairy cooperative, Organic Valley. Thirty percent of the organic dairy farmers in the
state are in this region despite the fact that it only accounts for 10 % of the dairy
farms, and this is also one of the denser areas of Amish farming settlements in the