Amish Dedication to Farming and Adoption of Organic Dairy Systems - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 241

While Amish farms may be well suited to organic production, the percent of
Amish dairy producers who use certified organic practices is small. 14 Because the
decisions governing stewardship and practices like organic do not necessary address
overarching Amish values directly, the decisions tend to differ by settlement even for
Amish settlements that have a lot of commonalities, such as Cashton and Hillsboro.
Overall, a higher percentage of Hillsboro Amish (15 %) produce organic dairy
compared to Cashton producers (8 %). The Cashton Amish who do not practice
and market organically tend to have more extreme bounded rationality views about
organics.
This section begins with a summary of overarching Amish views on organic
methods. The core assessment of Amish organic adoption decisions is made in the
context of the local community, individual settlements, and individual households
and then briefly compared to non-Amish producers. This community - settlement
approach among the Amish is distinct from the standard approach to adoption
decision-making where individual farm households are frequently the beginning and
end of the analysis.
Although there are no explicit edicts about organic agriculture in the Ordnung for
Amish settlements, there is an overarching sentiment about stewardship and what
is natural. One Hillsboro Amish expressed it this way, “I feel that the Christian
God made the earth with laws of the land, and if you go against those laws,
there are going to be problems.” As one Cashton Elder adds, “It's always been
our underlying thought that being stewards of the earth is not being destructive or
detrimental.” Although there is a commitment to follow God's rules in terms of
what is “natural,” this mainly translates to Amish settlements merely abstaining
from the growth hormone, rBST and genetically modified organisms. As a writer in
an Amish newsletter stated about genetic engineering, “I could be wrong, but to me
that conflicts with the laws of God” (King 2006 [letter to the editor]). However, there
may be quite a few Amish farmers who buy conventional seeds not knowing whether
the seed is GMO or not (Brock 2010 ). This idea of what is natural or not, does not
translate to a clear stance among Amish communities on organic methods overall.

12.7 Organic Decision-Making: The Community Level

One needs to know something about the management and history of Old Country
Cheese co-op if one is going to understand organic adoption decisions of Cashton
and Hillsboro Amish farmers. Old Country Cheese was started in 1982 by a group

14 “In 1997, Ohio had no certified organic dairies but in a few years there were over one hundred,
and ninety percent of them were Amish and Old Order Mennonite” (Kraybill et al. 2013 ). Across
the United States, the organic option seems to be playing an important role in Amish agriculture
in some parts of the country as noted earlier. Greenfield Farms ( http://www.gffarms.com/ ) inOhio
is one example (Kraybill 2001 ; Mariola and McConnell 2013 ). Another example, closer to the
Wisconsin settlements in this paper, is Kalona Organics in Iowa ( http://www.kalonaorganics.com/