Amish Dedication to Farming and Adoption of Organic Dairy Systems - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 230

farmers (Sommers and Napier 1993 ; Jackson 1998 ), and a recent ethnographic
assessment of Amish community lifestyle contrasts their approach to sustainability
with other faith groups (Vonk 2011 ). One study discusses the use of contour
plowing patterns, a soil conservation strategy, among Amish farmers in the Kick-
apoo Valley in Wisconsin (Heasley 2005 ), but it does not consider how local
norms might vary across Amish communities and affect their adoption of these
practices.
Our work also diverges from farm decision-making literature. Instead of focusing
solely on household level decision-making, our study explores the values and
constraints operating at the community, settlement and household levels for Amish
farmers. Although there are no systematic studies on the prevalence of organic agri-
culture among Amish farmers, discussions in Amish newsletters reveal divergent
views. In some areas of the country (e.g. Ohio), organic farming among the Amish
is growing (Kraybill et al. 2013 ), while in other areas (e.g., Missouri), it is not
widespread.
This chapter explores the adoption of organic dairy systems by Amish farmers in
one region of Wisconsin at a time that saw rapid growth of organic farming among
smaller pasture based farms. More specifically, this chapter examines similarities
and differences across two neighboring Old Order Amish settlements in order to
shed light on the nuances and complexities of decision-making processes in two
Amish settlements. The research in this chapter is also a unique contribution to the
literature as it embeds the findings on adoption decisions of Amish farmers in a
larger study that includes non-Amish farmers (Brock 2010 ).
The combination of oikonomia and bounded rationality frameworks offers an
approach that describe how values and internal and external constraints (particu-
larly around information) combine to illuminate the complexities around adopting
organic dairy and the subtle differences between different church settlements. Since
values and bounded rationality issues are often pertinent in other contexts, this
framework is also useful for studying organic adoption and other complex system
decision making in other contexts outside of the Amish settlements.
As suggested above, the Amish motivations to farm, and their management
decisions, are deeply linked to their own cultural and spiritual identity, as well
as their ecological and economic viability on the land. The only way one can
gain insights into the particularities of the Amish church and social structure,
as well as specific oikonomia and bounded rationality issues, is to incorporate
Anabaptist theology and gain insights from conversations with church leaders and
Amish farmers. We started with a survey to gain a picture of the structure of
dairy farms from two Old Order Amish settlements in Southwest Wisconsin,

Cashton and Hillsboro. Although these settlements are both very similar, subtle
differences between these settlements have led the Hillsboro settlement to be more
open to alternative practices such as organic agriculture. One needs to look at
factors that impact decisions at the community, church settlement level, and then
the family level to fully understand Amish decision-making. This is a fundamentally
different approach from standard decision-making studies in economics in which the
individual is the center of analysis. Though our study largely focuses on the factors